That footnote in Weston’s diary — the woman who hired herself to Israel Wood and was found out — is in some ways the most vivid surviving document of her life. Not because it tells us the most, but because it was written without any awareness of future significance, by someone who had no stake in the story’s outcome, at the moment the event was happening. It is the closest the documentary record comes to a simple, unmediated account of something that happened: a woman in Middleborough in January 1782, caught in the first attempt to become a soldier, and identified.
Four months after that diary entry, she tried again. This time it worked. She served seventeen months, was wounded, cared for her own wound, served as aide to a general, fell ill in Philadelphia, was found out, and was honorably discharged. She spent the next four decades of her life as a farmer’s wife in Sharon with a musket ball in her thigh, teaching school, raising children, petitioning Congress, speaking from stages in military uniform, and pursuing the recognition that her country had not automatically provided.
That is the story the documentary record supports. It is enough.
## A Note on Sources and Their Limits
Any article about Deborah Sampson Gannett that attempts to be factually responsible needs to be explicit about what it is and is not doing with its sources. This article has used the best available institutional sources — the Museum of the American Revolution, the Paul Revere House, the New England Historical Society, Smithsonian Magazine’s coverage of the Weston diary — and has tried to be clear about where sources disagree and where the documentary record does not support specific claims.