Deborah Sampson (December 17, 1760 - April 27, 1827) was the first known American woman to impersonate a man in order to join the Army. She gave her name as Robert Shirtliffe, of Uxbridge, Massachusetts and successfully convinced the Uxbridge Sergeant that she was a \women in order to join the Continental Army near the end of the American Revolution.

Deborah Sampson was born in Plympton, Massachusetts on December 17, 1760. Her real name was Deborah Samson, when a man named Mann wrote a biography on her he misspelled her name as Sampson. People who wrote her name on memorials and biographies used the misspelled version, so her name is now very commonly misspelled.She was the oldest of six children of Jonathan and Deborah Bradford Sampson, both of them direct Mayflower descendants. Her siblings were Jonathan, Sylvia and Nehemiah. The family lived in Middleborough, Massachusetts. Her family was poor and her father was rumored to have drowned in a shipwreck in 1765, when Deborah was almost five years old. The family later discovered that he left them and started a new life in Maine. Her mother supported the family and her children were sent to live at different households. Deborah lived in two different households; first with a spinster, and then with the widow of Reverend Peter Thatcher. She became an indentured servant in the household of Deacon Jeremiah and Susannah Thomas, the parents of ten sons in 1770. She grew strong and mastered both traditional men's and women's work including fertilizing and plowing fields, milking cows, stacking hay, carpentry, spinning, sewing and weaving cloth. She educated herself by reading books that she found around the house and by tagging along with the Thomas sons to the town schoolroom. With this education she began to develop a great interest in politics and in the events of the war that had begun between the American colonies and the Kingdom of Great Britain.

When she turned 18 and was released from her indentured servitude with the Thomas family, she got a job as a local school teacher where she taught both boys and girls. Deborah was at the age where most young women got married. Her mother wanted her to settle down although she had no interest in it. After all those years she wanted an adventure.