Top Presidents Ranked - The Final Part

Previously, I ranked George Washington at the number two spot on my personal list of top five U.S. presidents, which should leave little doubt as to who will claim first place.

But first, to recap where we’ve been thus far:

5. Ronald Reagan
4. Theodore Roosevelt
3. Ulysses S. Grant
2. George Washington

I launched this series on August 23, 2023, to coincide with the first 2024 presidential election debate. Today, I wrap it up just days before the first GOP primary caucus in Iowa. A word on why I did that: Over the past 20 years or so, Americans have seemed to be faced with (and perhaps for good reason) diminishing respect for the U.S. presidency, a novel and distinctly American office populated by some of the greatest men ever to walk the face of the earth. The dozens of men and women who have vied for the position over the past few decades seemed to be focused on all the wrong qualifications—“Do I have enough money”; "Do I have enough influence?”; “Can I draw a crowd?” These questions matter. But the primary question seems not to have crossed many people’s minds. 

The question every White House hopeful should have asked himself or herself is: “Am I worthy? Am I worthy and ready to take on that mantle and embody that tradition for my generation?”

Raising money, wielding influence, and wooing crowds all help win elections. They do not guarantee a successful presidency.

By focusing on the qualities that made our past leaders great — and set the great ones apart from the rest — my hope has been to reorient ourselves around the features, facets, and properties of leadership that actually matter. And perhaps no other president serves as a better example of those qualities than Abraham Lincoln.

To be fair, Lincoln and Washington are virtually neck to neck. If you rank the father of his country in first place, that’s fine by me. Personally, I tend to oscillate between the two when deciding who is best. But in the end, I always seem to gravitate back toward Lincoln.

It’s not just that he led the nation through the single most perilous crisis in its history, but he did so remarkably well. He did so with statesmanship, eloquence, humility, kindness, joy, determination, clarity, immense sorrow, and great personal sacrifice. The more one studies his life, the more apparent it becomes that Lincoln was uniquely equipped — by Providence, he would have said — to play a role in history that no one else could have played. In the corridors of time, Lincoln often stood alone.

His generals often failed him, his wife could be erratic, and his cabinet consisted of men who once looked down on him (hence the title of Doris Kearns Goodwin’s aptly named Lincoln biography, “Team of Rivals”). The abolitionists said he did too little and moved too slowly, while the South said he did too much and came on too strong. He faced internal pressure to compromise on slavery and to press the issue more forcefully. Lincoln simply could not please everyone.

His beloved Union was at war; patience with the president was low; and the political climate was ripe to misunderstand him.

Writer Mark Bowden put it this way: “We take for granted, of course, the scornful outpouring from the Confederate states; no action Lincoln took short of capitulation would ever have quieted his Southern critics. But the vituperation wasn’t limited to enemies of the Union. The North was ever at his heels. No matter what Lincoln did, it was never enough for one political faction, and too much for another.”

And yet, Lincoln knew what to do. He possessed a certain moral clarity that steered him through the dark night of the nation’s soul — and his own.

Often, Lincoln was “not very well,” “sadness … permeated his whole being.” He resonated with the biblical book of Job, a book of profound tragedy. The “mighty scourge of war” wrapped its merciless tethers around him and ravaged him. Yet his faith in the light that guided him persisted.

“Neither let us be slandered from our duty by false accusations against us, nor frightened from it by menaces of destruction to the Government nor of dungeons to ourselves,” he once declared. “Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it.”

“Our duty” — duty was paramount to Lincoln. As the president’s religious views expanded, and he came to see all of history as the sometimes glorious, sometimes tragic, but always cryptic play of which God himself was the author, he increasingly perceived his own part in that play as deference to a higher power. He had a God-ordained job to do, and Lincoln’s sense of duty left him with no choice but to do it.

“As we understand it” — that was just the problem, though: no one else seemed to understand it. Lincoln’s path — the path toward saving the Union — required statesmanship, discretion, and, perhaps most frustrating of all, tactfulness, none of which were exactly popular in an age of slavery, extremism, and civil war.

Lincoln was both political and moral. He knew how to do the shrewd thing; he knew how to do the right thing; he knew how to do the shrewd thing at the right time. This was key to navigating a troubled nation’s course, if not always well-received. Little by little, however, the strokes of Lincoln’s brush came into clearer view. And his final work — once maligned, mocked, and despised — silenced the critics. 

“I see now the wisdom of his course, leading public opinion slowly but surely up to the final blow for freedom,” confessed Elizabeth Cady Stanton, an abolitionist who “worked and prayed in 1864 for the defeat of Lincoln’s re-election.” She later regretted her opposition to the man she once called “Dishonest Abe.” Her revelation — “I see now the wisdom of his course” — was shared, sadly often after the accursed thespian’s bullet found its mark, by many of his critics. (MEACHAM, J. (2022). Epilogue, pg. 419. In And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle (p. 419). RANDOM HOUSE.)

In the early 1860s, William Lloyd Garrison, another abolitionist, ruthlessly affronted the president. Lincoln, as Garrison saw it, had “not a drop of anti-slavery in his blood,” was “manifestly without moral vision,” “incompetent to lead,” “destitute of hearty abhorrence of slavery,” and “a dwarf in my mind.” He even stooped so low as to dub him the “President of African Colonization.”

But his tune eventually changed: “There is no mistake about it in regard to Mr. Lincoln’s desire to do all that he can see it right and possible for him to do to uproot slavery, and give fair play to the emancipated,” he conceded. “To those who have struggled so long for the total abolition of slavery, and whose desires for the speedy realization of all their aims and aspirations have naturally been of the most ardent character, Mr. Lincoln has seemed exceedingly slow in all his emancipatory measures. For this he has been severely chided…. Yet what long strides he has taken in the right direction, and never a backward step!”

Notably, it was not the abolitionists — the purists — who finished the job but Abraham Lincoln, the “exceedingly slow” but ultimately vindicated statesman.

The 16th president of the United States played the long game, suffered the nation’s abuse because of it, and changed history.

Such is the way of prudence. Such is the way of faith in one’s duty. Such was the way of Lincoln.

And if only we, today, could once more see the wisdom of such a course, a man worthy of the office might again emerge.