In 1782, a wounded Revolutionary War soldier fought off comrades trying to take them to a doctor, then snuck out of the hospital to dig a musket ball from their own thigh with a penknife and sewing needle, all to protect a secret. That soldier was a woman named Deborah Sampson.

This episode examines the lengths a person will go to escape a life of predetermined poverty and servitude, tracing Sampson from abandoned indentured servant to elite shock trooper to one of America’s first female lecturers.

• Her brutal childhood: an absent father, a destitute mother descended from a Plymouth governor, and self-education by intercepting the Thomas boys’ schoolwork
• Why she enlisted as Robert Shurtleff in the Light Infantry, using the army’s tallest-and-strongest sorting to hide her own height
• The self-surgery at Tarrytown and how her cover finally broke during a fever epidemic, with Dr. Barnabas Binney hiding her in his own home
• Her post-war fight for back pay, her stage tour performing the 27-step manual of arms, and Paul Revere’s lobbying for her federal pension
• The historical debate over her gender and sexuality, including the flirtation with the Baltimore Lady, and the 2020 Deborah Sampson Act