CACrown ArchivesThe cinema collection
Menu
Research dossier · General Reference

Sally St. Clair

American military personnel

Cross-disciplinary reference desk with index cards, atlas, dictionary and catalogue
General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionJan 5, 2026
Entity authorityQ39049412 ↗
Source-derived summary

Sally St. Clair or St. Clare (died 1782) was an American woman from South Carolina who disguised herself as a man and joined the Continental Army. Her true gender was not discovered by her fellow soldiers until after she was killed in battle during the Siege of Savannah in 1782.

Little is known about St. Clair. She is variously described as a Creole woman, a woman of color, and a woman of African and French descent. By some accounts she joined the army to be with her lover, sergeant William Jaspar from Francis Marion's Brigade, and was killed saving his life. She may have served as a gunner. Several sources claim she was killed during the Battle of Savannah in 1778.

Editorial summary

“Sally St. Clair” enters the record as american military personnel. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Sally, Clair and American can confirm, complicate or overturn.

Editorial reviewA concise reference frame for defining the subject, testing terminology and identifying the institution closest to the evidence. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1782, 1778—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. Its strongest next move is a source search built around Sally, Clair and American.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

“Sally St. Clair” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Sally, Clair and American provides the most credible route into that argument.

Evidence profile

Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jan 5, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q39049412. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1782 and 1778.

Critical limits

The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.

Best used for
  • Subject orientation
  • Search vocabulary
  • Locating named sources
Verify next

The closest primary source, responsible institution and strongest cited specialist reference.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Sally St. Clair”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Sally St. Clair primary sources, Sally St. Clair archive and Sally research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Sally St. Clair”?
  2. What terminology or title could unlock a more precise catalogue search?
  3. Which institution is responsible for the underlying evidence?
Subject index

Search terms from this dossier

Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Sally St. Clair” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.