America’s Greatest President Ever: Abraham Lincoln

We break down why. 

Robert W. Merry [2]

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More than any other president, Lincoln left behind a nation transformed. All the great presidents set the country upon a new course at a time when the old direction no longer inspired confidence among citizens and voters. Washington, Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt—all fulfilled this necessity of presidential greatness; all defined the country anew by fashioning fresh political idioms that pulled together new political coalitions, thus allowing the country to move forward into new eras. But the Lincoln transformation was the most profound and most long-lasting. Thus does he get that top slot in nearly every poll of academics with the temerity to rate the presidents. Thus also does he continue to occupy a special locus in the hearts and minds of his countrymen down to our day.

Whenever academics and scholars tickle their fancy by putting forth yet another poll of historians on presidential rankings, there is little doubt about which president will top the list—Abraham Lincoln. In the numerous such polls executed since Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr. pioneered the genre in 1948 for Life magazine, Lincoln has come out as number one in nearly all of them. Of the seven surveys I pulled together for my 2012 book on the subject, Where They Stand [3], the Illinois rail-splitter was judged the nation’s greatest president in six of them. In the seventh (a 2005 Wall Street Journal poll), George Washington came out on top, with Lincoln in second place. (Franklin Roosevelt almost always occupies the number three slot.)

(This first appeared in 2015.)

As the nation prepares to observe Memorial Day, it might be a fitting time to ponder just what constituted Lincoln’s greatness. One could begin with his personal qualities and note the encomium of the political historian Thomas A. Bailey of Stanford. Lincoln, he wrote in 1966, was “undeniably a great man…in spirit, in humility, in humanity, in magnanimity, in patience, in Christlike charity, in capacity for growth, in political instincts, in holding together a discordant political following, in interpreting and leading public opinion and in seizing with bulldog grip the essential idea of preserving the Union.” What Bailey seems to be saying is that Lincoln was a political genius who also happened to be saintly.

That is an easy case to make. But presidential greatness ultimately is a matter of presidential performance. Greatness is as greatness does. And it might be worth speculating on what likely would have happened to Lincoln’s standing in history if he had lost his 1864 reelection bid.