Deborah Sampson (December 17, 1760 - April 29, 1827) was the first known American woman to impersonate a man in order to join the Army. She gave her name as Robert Shurtliff, or Rob Shart, and successfully convinced the Uxbridge Seargent that she was a man 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 as the oldest of six children of Jonathan and Deborah Bradford Sampson both of them were direct Mayflower descendants. Her siblings were Jonathan,Ephraim, 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. But the family later discovered that he left his family 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. Until she became an indentured servant in the household of Deacon Jeremiah and Susannah Thomas the parents of ten sons in 1770. She became 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.