Set during the Revolutionary War, this is a story about how Deborah Sampson takes on the persona of a male soldier in the army. One of three daughters and three sons of Jonathan and Deborah Sampson; her youth is spent in poverty after her father abandons the family and goes off and drowns at sea. Her mother, unable to support all the children, eventually sends Deborah off as a servant to the household of Jeremiah Thomas. With an education that is mostly self-taught, she doesn’t want the life of a school teacher or of a weaver, another trade for a woman. A chance meeting with Nathan Andrews happens at a party, which takes place when she returns to the home of her mother, whom she hasn’t seen for many years. A quick romance with Nathan leads to a marriage ceremony however, before the ceremony is over, Deborah runs off and leaves her husband stranded. She purchases some men’s clothes and manages to enlist in the army disguised as a man. She’d come to feel that it would be more honorable to be suffocated with the smoke from a cannon than to waste a useful, intended existence in despair suffocating by the smoke from a chimney in a warm farmhouse just because she’d been born a girl. After a number of battles in which she proves herself as a competent soldier, her husband finally tracks her down. She manages to maintain her independence in spite of Nathans continual pleading for reconciliation. Eventually she is wounded in battle, and while being treated in a military hospital, the doctor discovers that she is actually a woman. Nathan continues trying to convince Deborah to leave the army and rejoin him in the marriage they had planned. Eventually she agrees and leaves the army to return to a life with Nathan.
