There’s plenty to admire about Abigail Adams.

She’s perhaps most famous for urging the Continental Congress, through her husband John, to “remember the ladies.” Something they did not do.

It’s less well known that when her Quincy, Massachusetts, neighbors refused to send their kids to school with a Black child – a servant of Abigail’s – she faced them down, quoting the Golden Rule.

She had an unattractive side, too. She and husband John talked three of their four adult children out of marrying the person they truly loved. And there were the racist moments. When she saw “Othello” in London, it freaked her out to see the “sooty” Othello touch the “fair” Desdemona.

Yet what spurred Dr. Woody Holton to write “Abigail Adams” had nothing to do with any of that. The topic of Holton’s previous book had been the men who speculated in Revolutionary War bonds. Because of the subject’s complexity, he sought out one man to use as representative for all the others. The problem was that no single individual was very well documented. “Then I finally found a speculator who left an abundant paper trail,” he says. “But it wasn’t a guy. It was Abigail Adams.”

Holton, a professor of history at the University of South Carolina, will discuss his book “Abigail Adams” on July 18 as part of the Walter W. Craigie Speaker Series at St. John’s Church. A pre-talk reception is included in the ticket purchase.

Early bond speculator

Unlikely as it sounds, Abigail Adams was a shrewd speculator in depreciated government securities. She started off in international trade while John was serving as a diplomat in France. Store shelves were empty once the British Royal Navy began to embargo European merchandise from reaching America’s shores. “Abigail got John to send her small packets of things to sell, things like handkerchiefs, which were a women’s item in those days,” Holton explains. “Then she could name her own price for them and still attract customers.”

After a couple of the shipments were captured by the British, John was ready to abandon their scheme. Abigail had other ideas, writing her husband that, “If one in three arrives, I should [still] be a gainer.” Her dutiful husband stuck with it and eventually arranged for her to deal directly with the merchants of Paris and Amsterdam.

From there, she was on to bond speculation. She initially relied on her uncle, a doctor, for investment advice. “But within a few years, he was getting stock tips from her,” Holton says. “And bond speculation was even sleazier then than junk bond trading is today.”

Just as questionable was her speculation in Vermont land. The whole region that’s now the state of Vermont was claimed by New York state, so this was her riskiest investment of all, and at one point, John wrote telling her not to meddle any more with Vermont. “But then she started bargaining with him, finding ways to maximize her investment, which did indeed take off,” Holton says.

A preacher’s daughter

So, what was it in Abigail’s background that gave her the confidence to assert her views at a time when that wasn’t the norm for women? Holton posits that it was the result of being a preacher’s kid, which he likens to “being a governor’s kid in that it gets you used to sitting in the first pew.”

Abigail received very little formal education, but she and her female cohorts took responsibility for educating each other, primarily by exchanging letters as a way to practice their script, their grammar and their ability to analyze books.

But the greatest boost to her self-confidence came from marrying John, who was highly educated, supremely self-confident and with a tendency toward arrogance, a trait even he recognized in himself. “Abigail often knocked him down to size. A lot of guys of that era referred to their mates as ‘my child,’ Holton says. “John wouldn’t have dared. Both tended to address their letters to each other using ‘My dearest Friend.’”

Happy marriage aside, Abigail took some of the money she’d earned for her husband, often unscrupulously, set it aside, and called it her own, even though married women at the time weren’t allowed to own property. She just did it anyway.

Two years before she died, she did something else married women weren’t supposed to do: she wrote a will. “After her death in 1818, John carried out her wishes to a T,” Holton says of Abigail’s dutiful husband. “That made it legally unassailable.”

Not surprisingly, Abigail was the kind of woman who exerted her wishes from the grave. Although at the time she wrote her will, several of her male relatives were in deep financial trouble, she left them nothing.

Everything went to women, including her female servants.

Holton sees her most powerful legacy as the one she enjoys today, inspiring men as well as women to challenge the hierarchies we inherit.

“As we get closer to July 4, 2026, she could also be a great role model for complexity and by that, I mean someone who had traits we admire and others we don’t,” he says. “As we’re all discovering, you could say the same thing about Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefferson.”

A book talk and reception for “Abigail Adams” with Dr. Woody Holton will be held on Friday, July 18 at 5:30 p.m. at St. John’s Church, 2401 East Broad St. Tickets