The Women of the American Revolution

Amy Harmon, A Girl Called Samson: a Novel

Deborah “Rob” Samson grew up as an indentured servant in colonial Connecticut, surrounded by farmer boys and their dreams of war and glory. So when the American Revolution started, she watched her foster brothers enlist, and she watched the condolence letters come home. But Deborah believes the high-minded Revolutionary ideology, and memorizes the Declaration of Independence. It only makes sense for her to eventually run away and enlist.

The first thing to remember when reading prolific author Amy Harmon’s latest historical novel is that Deborah Samson (or Sampson) was a very real person. She really enlisted near the culmination of the Revolution, serving for seventeen months as Robert Shurtliff. Therefore, Harmon’s story is circumscribed by history, and often lacks the unity and panache of wholly fictional stories. Life often lacks a plausible through-line.

Rather than inventing the story, Harmon invents Samson’s untidy inner turmoil. She creates a heroine who reads the Bible and Thomas Paine, and believes their exhortations. What Samson doesn’t believe is the narrative given her, of the importance of finding a husband and assuming domestic duties. She doesn’t want a colonial woman’s limited options; she wants the life promised to the men surrounding her, and she’ll lie to achieve it.

Harmon presents this novel as the memoir Deborah Samson never wrote. (She spoke prolifically, but left few texts.) Samson describes the various lessons learned from authority figures around her: the parish pastor who encourages her literacy, the employers who treat her more like a daughter than the help, and her foster brothers. She learns to trust her own capabilities, and shows little patience with social niceties foisted upon women.

But when she hits adulthood, something changes. Everyone around her begins pressuring her to marry; by colonial standards, she’s considered an old maid at twenty. Modern audiences will surely sympathize, as authorities spend a child’s first eighteen years encouraging them to dream, then the rest of their lives telling that former child to wake up. To us, Samson’s refusal isn’t rebellious, it’s a reasonable response to unreasonable expectations.

Amy Harmon

That collision between the story’s historical context and the audience’s expectations is where I begin having problems. Harmon trusts our instinctive reactions, which makes sense in reading a contemporary setting. When several men (including one of her foster brothers) make fumbling attempts to court Samson, she dismisses them flippantly, as we would; she doesn’t linger on them. And she doesn’t emphasize what an act of moral rebellion this refusal is.

Our story unfolds from there, more a series of episodes than a unified narrative. Samson progresses from bucolic agrarian childhood, through the relationship pressures of adolescence, to adulthood and enlistment, with remarkably little friction. Along the way, Samson has various encounters with historical figures; though Harmon creates a fictional array of enlisted men to annoy Samson, the officers in Harmon’s narrative are actual people taken from the record.

One example should emphasize my disappointment. When Samson finally enlists (on the second try), she’s rostered with a battalion of locals who josh her for being young and pretty. They don’t know she’s marching in drag, obviously. These local regulars are one-dimensional, and identified entirely by their surnames. One youth shows some glimmerings of complexity, just before they’re all killed in a skirmish with De Lancey’s Brigade.

This narrative arc is taken directly from countless war movies. Bigger, more aggressive recruits haze our timid protagonist, but the arrogant swashbucklers are ill-prepared for war, and die quickly in front of our protagonist. The hero must then face the survivor’s guilt. Once again, Harmon relies upon our familiarity with the narrative trope, because she doesn’t return to it, or dive any deeper into the consequences.

Such problems abound. Samson has various encounters, which are isolated and seldom plumbed deeper. She acquits herself admirably in battle, and eventually becomes General John Paterson’s personal aide. Harmon ramrods in a Twelfth Night-ish implication of sublimated romance, then largely abandons it. Any of these might’ve been profitably expanded to a full-length novel, or deep-dive short story anyway. But Harmon mainly name-checks the war movie tropes, then blithely moves on.

The historical Deborah Samson was eventually discovered. In an unusual twist, she received, not a reprimand, but an honorable discharge, for her distinguished service; she later became the first woman to receive a U.S. Army pension. She was among her era’s few women to resist gender roles, and win. Samson was admirable, and Harmon clearly admires her. But admiration isn’t enough; this low-friction version of Samson’s story is ultimately lukewarm.