Jacob Lew's timing could not have been worse. In June, the Treasury Secretary declared that Alexander Hamilton, the founding father who created his agency, would have to yield his prime spot on the $10 bill to make way for a new bill designed to thwart counterfeiting and champion women.
But the proclamation arrived just as Broadway's new colossus, "Hamilton," was sealing Alexander's place in the nation's affections.
Lin-Manuel Miranda's thrilling portrayal of the swashbuckling orphan who rose to become George Washington's right-hand man, war hero to a fledgling nation and visionary builder of its institutions has given thousands of theatergoers an indelible appreciation for the man on the bill.
Contrast that to some of the women being thrust forward to succeed or share space with him on "#thenew10," as Treasury is calling it. There is good ol' Betsy Ross, who sewed our flag (yawn), and a ballooning list of presidential wives from Martha Washington to Eleanor Roosevelt (sure). And because the only prerequisite is that a person must be dead to be eligible, contenders keep coming. Scientists have proposed Sally Ride and Amelia Earhart. The American Red Cross is pushing its founder. Helen Keller and Pocahontas have their admirers, and hallowed abolitionists and civil rights figures such as Harriet Tubman and Susan B. Anthony top many shortlists.
Good women all. Still, it is hard to imagine anyone short of Scheherazade who might excite or delight quite like the incumbent. Treasury may feel obliged to spotlight a woman. But 40 percent of adults polled in July by Harris thought that "a different bill should have been selected for sharing" -- and that was when "Hamilton" was still in previews.
Pray, then, what to do?
The solution, I submit, lies in the same faded pages of history where Mr. Hamilton's own crowd-pleasing story was rediscovered: a quick-thinking, cross-dressing, gun-toting heroine named Deborah Sampson Gannett, otherwise known as Private Robert Shurtleff of Massachusetts. Disguised for more than a year as a man, she served her country, and bled for it, as a soldier in the Revolutionary War.
Much like Mr. Hamilton, here is someone who had to make her own way at an early age, without the benefit of parents or formal schooling. A fellow soldier capable of going mano a mano with Mr. Hamilton with a musket or bayonet. A fervent patriot in the War of Independence who never got the recognition she deserved. The total package.
Her story is so astonishing, I am chagrined to have missed it this long. Nor am I alone. Massachusetts honored Mrs. Gannett as its "official state heroine" in 1983, and several towns have celebrated her with statues, renamed roads and dinners. But she is far from a household name there or anywhere. Americans' amnesia has rubbed her out in a way that British muskets never could. Even Thursday's decision from the Pentagon allowing women to serve in all combat roles, hailed as "ground-breaking," completely overlooked her -- she, at the birth of it all.
Born in Plymton around 1760, near where her Pilgrim ancestors landed the prior century, Deborah Samson, as the family name was originally spelled, was part of a large, impoverished brood who long thought their father was "lost at sea." (Authorities eventually treated it as a case of abandonment.)
The children's over-strapped mother farmed Deborah out to families in need of help when she was barely 5. From 10 to 18, the girl worked as an indentured servant, doing farm work and making cloth, in a home full of boys in Middleborough. Deprived of schooling, she devoured books and taught herself enough to be a teacher once her indenture ended.
Living in Massachusetts, she came of age with a ringside seat to the revolution. History shows, however, that she was not content simply to sew uniforms for soldiers heading to battle. She wanted to be one.
Her first try did not go well. Under the law, she risked imprisonment simply by donning men's garments -- and, perhaps, damnation, given the reaction of her churchmen. They spent months investigating an incident where she tried "dressing in men's cloths and inlisting as a soldier," and expelled her, according to minutes, dated Sept. 3, 1782. By then, she had left Middleborough and secretly enlisted in the Continental Army under the assumed name of Robert Shurtleff.
Scholars are split on whether her military service began that year or the year before. Records exist to support both views and journals she kept that might have shed light were lost when a storm-tossed boat she took sank in the Hudson.
The different start dates affect where she saw action. But the broader contours of the narrative are not up for dispute. Commanding officers vouched for her service after the war, and scholars, statesmen and government agencies that investigated her claims came away satisfied that she served as a soldier for more than a year, displayed bravery in the face of the enemy and suffered combat wounds that dogged her for life. These include a gash to the head from a saber and some musket shots. She extracted one musket ball herself, lest an army doctor discover her disguise. Another was lodged so deep, she bore it to the grave.
Former Westchester County Historical Association Society Trustee Jane Keiter, writing for "The Westchester Historian" and the National Women's History Museum's website, has marshalled compelling evidence that Pvt. Shurtleff belonged to Captain George Webb's Light Infantry, an elite company within the 4th Regiment of Massachusetts, as far back as spring 1781.
That would corroborate Mrs. Gannett's claims -- asserted in a pension declaration and elsewhere -- that she was "at the capture of Lord Cornwallis," at that fall's decisive battle in Yorktown, Virginia. If so, she would have shared a battlefield with Mr. Hamilton's friend and ally, the Marquis de Lafayette.
Even if Yorktown is stricken from the timeline, there is enough derring-do and deprivation here for an HBO miniseries. Credit that in part to her being stationed in and around Westchester, a no-man's-land where bloody skirmishes raged on until the last of the king's men evacuated New York in 1783.
Alfred F. Young, a prominent historian who published "Masquerade," a book about Mrs. Gannett, before his death in 2012, was firmly of the view that she joined in 1782, after Yorktown. His 2004 book nonetheless recounts many perilous missions and scouting trips involving Pvt. Shurtleff that helped keep British soldiers and Tory sympathizers at bay. "She stood out as a soldier who volunteered and took the initiative,'' he wrote. As a member of the light infantry, he noted, "she was credible" to the commanding officers who vouched for her after the war. So, he asserted, "she should be credible to us."
The long-running masquerade unraveled, much as our heroine feared, at the hands of an army doctor, in 1783. General John Paterson, whose personal staff she was attached to when she took ill, greeted the news that the uniformed soldier before him might be a woman with disbelief and exclaimed, "Can it be so?" according to the memoir Mrs. Gannett published 14 years later. With the war winding down, there were no reprimands, just an honorable discharge on Oct. 25, 1783, in writing.
She returned to Massachusetts and transformed herself again, this time into a farmer's wife by marrying Benjamin Gannett of Sharon in 1785. They raised three children there, and, despite unremitting poverty, took in a fourth whose mother died in childbirth.
Whether they approved, Mrs. Gannett's contemporaries were aware of her military experience. Massachusetts granted the former soldier £34 in back pay in 1792, in a bill signed by Governor John Hancock, once the state's General Court verified her service. It found that she "exhibited an extraordinary instance of female heroism by discharging the duties of a faithful gallant soldier, and at the same time preserving the virtue and chastity of her sex, unsuspected and unblemished."
With money still tight, she hit the road in 1802 and lectured about her wartime adventures to paying audiences throughout New England, according to handbills, news accounts and a travel journal that Sharon's public library has digitized. Notices assured locals that "the American heroine, who served three years as a private soldier in the Continental Army" was speaking "at the request of a number of respectable persons."
Her prepared remarks, on file with the Dedham Historical Society, contained soothing apologies for having "swerved from the accustomed flowry paths of female delicacy," paired with more defiant stances, daring her audience to consider, "Why our Maker made us such."
Though her expense logs show she splurged for hairdressers before some appearances, she also changed into her uniform at some to demonstrate the soldier's "manual of arms." Events typically ended with a rendition of "God Save the 16 States."
Saving the Gannetts was a concern, too, and she spent decades petitioning Washington for veterans' benefits the country gradually bestowed on those who fought for freedom.
Paul Revere chimed in at the federal level, according to letters on file with the Massachusetts Historical Society. "I think her case much more deserving than hundreds to whom Congress have been generous," he wrote a Massachusetts Congressman in 1804.
Congress finally awarded Mrs. Gannett a disability pension of $4 a month the following year. It did not stretch back to her discharge two decades earlier, but did go back to 1803.
By 1818, Washington was offering veterans who could prove they were indigent $8 a month. Reporting a net worth consisting solely of $20 of clothing, Mrs. Gannett qualified.
She died on April 29, 1827, in her 60s, and her husband carried on the fight the following decade by applying for benefits that Congress extended to Revolutionary War "widows." He had two strikes against him, too: not only did the law make no provision for "widowers," it also expected couples to be married during the war to qualify.
He died before Congress acted, but legislators were sufficiently moved by his wife's example as a "revolutionary soldier," and appeals from former president John Quincy Adams, that they awarded the couple's children $80 a year in 1838, retroactive to 1831. "The whole history of the American Revolution records no case like this, and furnishes no other similar example of female heroism, fidelity and courage," the legislative committee wrote. "As there cannot be a parallel case in all time to come, the committee do not hesitate to grant relief."
In the statute, lawmakers directed "the Secretary of the Treasury" himself to handle the payments to ensure that the I.O.U. got settled properly.
If the current holder of that office is uninterested in singing Mrs. Gannett's praises anew, perhaps Mr. Miranda will kindly show him how.
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