Originally posted by Classicalla:
After taking a quick peek at the list, it seemed to me that those at the top of the list are the most well-known presidents. So I have to wonder if the historians who voted on this had that in mind.
You may have something there. I noticed that most of the presidents rated at the bottom were the ones between Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln and between Grant and Teddy Roosevelt, none of them household names. I'm sure there's a popularity contest of sorts going on with only a portion of the rankings based on actual performance in office.
For instance, Lincoln deserved much of his bottom-dwelling ratings during his years in office. Most don't know that he was a meddler in military affairs, much like Lyndon Johnson was during Vietnam. Lincoln wanted a say in everything, despite the fact that he had never served as a military leader. He was in the Kentucky militia for a while but had no experience leading soldiers. His micromanagement was not very appreciated by his generals. One of the Union's finest generals, General John Reynolds, refused appointment as commander of the Army of the Potomac because of Lincoln's meddling. Unfortunately Reynolds was killed only a few months later as commander of the First Corps at Gettysburg. As army commander and not corps commander, he would not have been at the front, so his loss was a tragedy. As army commander, he may have been the one man who could have beaten Lee consistently. But history will never know.
George Meade eventually did at Gettysburg, but much of it had to do with luck and a brain freeze by Lee when Lee ordered Pickett's Charge towards the Union center on day 3. If Meade hadn't fortuitously sent Gouverneur Warren to unprotected Little Round Top just to see what was happening on his left flank while he himself was busy paying attention to Lee's secondary attack on his right flank, Lee would have destroyed the entire Union Army on the second day of battle. The war would have been lost in 1863. Instead the heroic stand by the 20'th Maine and its commander, Colonel Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, saved the day after Warren, without authority, rushed the regiment into battle after seeing the danger.
Lincoln was also responsible for appointing a long line of failures to the command of the Army of the Potomac. Among them was George McClellan who was afraid of his own shadow and wouldn't act unless he outnumbered the Confederates at least 2-1, squandered his advantages in the Peninsula Campaign and at Antietam where a full 40,000 of his soldiers did not even participate because McClellan was afraid that he would be attacked soon by troops that didn't exist. Lee's entire army at the time numbered 35,000. Ambrose Burnside was another horrible appointment, a man widely considered to be among the worst military leaders in world history, having overseen the Union massacre at Fredericksburg and the disastrous mistakes he made at the Battle of the Crater and at Antietam.
On the other hand, Lincoln was a master politician who had an iron will, refusing to back down even in the face of universal opposition. Without his firm grasp, he could easily have folded to pressure and lost the Civil War when the war seemed hopeless at times. For that, he gets put near the front of the line. Of course, if Lincoln had had the press that Bush 43 had today, Lincoln would have been impeached by 1862 for things far more egregious than the far milder Patriot Act or wiretapping or military tribunals people rave about today. Lincoln, unlike Bush, threw his opponents in the press in prison. I find it amusing that the press today somehow compares President Obama with Lincoln when it was Obama's immediate predecessor who had far more in common with President Lincoln than he could ever hope to have. Lincoln was the unpopular dictator who did as he pleased without regards to the opposition, trampled all over the Constitution, and stubbornly refused to listen to people who demanded he end the unpopular war without victory. Yet Lincoln is rated #1. Hmm.
