A lively look at Abigail Adams — and her sisters

Unlike Martha Washington, who destroyed nearly all correspondence with her illustrious spouse, John and Abigail Adams, present at the dawn of the American republic, knew that they wrote for posterity.

As a result, their family papers, including Abigail’s more than 2,100 thoughtful, revealing letters, have been a magnet for scholars and material for a mother lode of Adams books.

The writings of passionate, principled Abigail, who urged her blunt, brilliant husband to “remember the ladies” when drafting a new code of laws for the nation, even popped up as lyrics in the Broadway musical “1776.”

Most Adams biographers concentrate on the power couple’s enduring partnership, marriage and 40-year correspondence, but in the 528 pages of “Dear Abigail,” Diane Jacobs does something warm, real and different.

The author, who previously profiled 18th-century women’s rights advocate Mary Wollstonecraft, filmmaker Woody Allen and director Preston Sturges, focuses on the strong bond Abigail shared with her two sisters – all ardent rebels ahead of their time.

Three years younger than Mary and six years older than Elizabeth (called Betsy), quick-witted Abigail rankled that the family lavished all their learning on brother Billy. “Why should children of the same family be thus distinguished?” she complained.

But if not formally educated, the Smith sisters were well-read, taught by their mother and English tutor Richard Cranch, who introduced them to philosophy, Shakespeare, Milton and Pope.

All were small and slender with oval faces and bright dark eyes. Their romances, money worries, illnesses and grief play out against the colonists’ struggle for independence at the Boston Massacre, Battle of Bunker Hill and burning of Charleston.

This is eyewitness reporting, and it’s almost a shock to look up from this world of horse-drawn carriages and whale oil lamps to see streetlights and cars. Just as Abigail is such a big presence, it’s a surprise to see her slightly larger than life-size bronze statue, wearing a bonnet and standing arms folded in the Boston Women’s Memorial.

The sisters couldn’t hold office, vote or control property, but that didn’t keep them from voicing strong opinions. And because they were such lively prose stylists – Adams said Betsy had an “elegant pen” — they climb down from their Gilbert Stuart portraits and remind us of our own sisters and daughters.

All married as teens and moved away from the parsonage of their father, a liberal Congregationalist pastor and farmer, in Weymouth, Mass., a village that, Betsy quipped, was distinguished for its “inactivity.”

Mary wed brilliant but impractical Richard Cranch, 15 years her senior, and moved to Salem. John Adams at first thought the witty Smith sisters “not fond, not frank, not candid,” and his country manners appalled Abigail’s mother. But the ambitious Braintree lawyer and the 19-year-old he called “Miss Adorable” would be a matched set for 54 years.

Despite Abigail’s warning, Betsy wed Congregationalist minister John Shaw, who turned boozy and abusive, dying of liver disease at 47. But happily, minister husband No. 2 Stephen Peabody, Jacobs tells us, “transformed her vision of married love.”

Having tended the farm while her husband toiled in Philadelphia and France, Abigail agreed to join him, left two adolescent sons with Mary, and, with daughter Nabby and two servants, boarded the copper-bottomed “Active” for a four-week voyage to England.

While abroad she regaled her sisters with accounts of decadent Versailles, randy Ben Franklin’s flirtations with French “belles” of all ages and England’s jarring custom of separating the sexes for dinner and “the dreaded card room.”

Yes, it’s predominantly Abigail’s story, for she also lived in Philadelphia, New York and D.C., slept with a macher and moved amid giants. But “their souls entwined since birth,” Jacobs writes, and so Mary and Betsy kept their distant sister aware of “the daily texture of their lives” in New England.

Here, too, is Abigail’s famous “remember the ladies” letter as well as her husband’s snarky reply, her “epistolary affair with a married schoolteacher” while John was besotted with Paris and her candid opinions of George and Martha Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton.

Of course, history buffs will find some overlap with David McCullough, Phyllis Lee Levin’s “Abigail Adams” and Edith B. Gelles’ ”Abigail and John: Portrait of a Marriage,” the first tandem biography, among many others.

But Jacobs is a delightful, engaging writer who blows the dust off history, offers fresh insights and recalls these founding mothers who kept going when smallpox raged in Boston, Redcoats occupied their homeland and family tragedy struck. They worked wet clay without models and helped make a nation.