When historians rank American presidents, the Civil War features prominently in their deliberations. Nearly all historians consider Lincoln one of the paramount examples of presidential leadership. Lincoln presided over a nation broken in two; his chief competitor for the top ranking, George Washington, guided a messy quasi-nation that included loyalistswho had opposed the rebellion Washington had led. Both presidents made great efforts to realize the American ideal of E Pluribus Unum.
The lowest-ranked presidents likewise cluster ominously around the edges of the Civil War. Whereas unity is a mark of Lincoln and Washington, divisiveness is a recurring trait among the least admired executives. It’s a key reason why Donald Trump has already joined their club.
In a 2017 C-Span survey of 91 historians who ranked the presidents (not including Trump) on measures such as crisis management and international relations, the bottom five includes three presidents whose administrations greased the skids into the Civil War — John Tyler, Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan — along with the president most responsible for squandering the war’s gains, Andrew Johnson. Only one president from outside the Civil War era, the notoriously unindustrious Warren G. Harding, whose administration is best known for corruption, made the bottom five.
Rankings are bound to have a subjective element, and the favor of historians is not constant over time. The top and bottom rankings, however, seem pretty durable. A Siena College survey of 157 presidential scholars, released in 2019, produced a similar roll call of failure — with one notable change. In this poll, Tyler loses his spot among the cellar dwellers to Trump, who is ranked third from the bottom, with only Johnson and Buchanan rated as worse presidents. That was before the coronavirus pandemic opened a new window on Trump’s breathtaking crisis management.
Andrew Johnson was a uniquely vile president. He betrayed the promise of emancipation, snatching defeat from victory and brutal servitude, for millions, from hard-won freedom. His “swing around the circle,” a series of Trump-like rallies he held mostly in the Midwest in 1866, was so divisive that his “intemperate, inflammatory, and scandalous harangues” became the basis of one of the articles of impeachment against him.
So Johnson may be hard to topple from last place. But what earned James Buchanan the second-to-last spot ahead of Trump?