On The Drew Mariani Show, Drew Mariani and Dr. Susan Hanssen step into a remarkable 50–year window of American history, from 1776 to 1826, when the men we call the Founding Fathers were also the nation’s presidents. George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe—and “honorary founder” John Quincy Adams—did not just shape documents; they governed a fragile new republic.

Dr. Hanssen notes that for a full half–century, every president was directly involved in the Revolution. They signed the Declaration of Independence, attended the Constitutional Convention, and serving in the war itself. Even young John Quincy Adams was sent overseas as a teenager, traveling all the way to the court of the czar in Russia to seek a loan for the War of Independence alongside his father.

Drew and Dr. Hanssen’s conversation turns to an extraordinary day: July 4, 1826. Exactly 50 years after the Declaration was promulgated, both Thomas Jefferson, a slave-holding Virginian from the South, and John Adams, a Puritan New Englander descended from abolitionists, died on the same day. After a “very controversial and bitter election,” they had stopped speaking, until Abigail Adams helped restore their friendship and a rich correspondence.

They held competing visions of this new nation: John Adams saw the Revolution as a conservative defense of existing English rights and liberties, while Jefferson compared it to the French Revolution, a more radical break from their past. As Adams lay dying in Quincy, Massachusetts, one of his final words was, “Jefferson still lives,” unaware that Jefferson had already died that morning at Monticello in Virginia.

Dr. Hanssen explains how this founding generation became the “fathers” Abraham Lincoln would later consult, especially on the question of slavery. Our very habit of asking about the “original intent” of the Founders—on religious liberty, slavery, or even what marriage meant in common law—is traced back to John Adams’s “midnight appointments,” especially his choice of John Marshall as chief justice of the Supreme Court. Over decades, Marshall’s decisions defined an independent judiciary and the Court’s power of judicial review, embedding the question, “Is that law constitutional?” deep into the American mind.

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