The Greatest US Presidents - The Times US presidential rankings

Who is the greatest of them all? While Barack Obama and John McCain battle to become the 44th President of the United States, we asked a panel of experts from The Times to rank the previous Commanders-in-Chief in order of greatness.

The No 1: our panel chose the radical Republican who kept the fledgling nation alive when it could have collapsed altogether.

The first Republican President, Lincoln led the defeat of the Confederate states in the American Civil War and freed around four million slaves by issuing the Emancipation Proclamation. The formal abolition of slavery in the US was ratified soon after his death.

He succeeded in unifying the nation militarily as well as laying out a moral imperative for its governance in his Gettysburg address. During the final days of the civil war he was shot dead by John Wilkes Booth.

"Fought and won a just war, kept the United States united and created the ground for a country which could live up to its constitution." Camilla Cavendish, columnist.

"Had the coolest-sounding presidential name of all time." Chris Ayres, Los Angeles correspondent.

Washington led the army that vanquished the British during the American Revolutionary War before presiding over the drafting of the Constitution. When it came to elect the first US President he was chosen unanimously by electors representing the 11 states of the Union.

He was celebrated as the Father of the Nation after expanding the Union and overseeing the creation of a taxation system, a national bank and the first Supreme Court judges. His Farewell Address also became one of the cornerstones of American democracy but he still missed out on top spot in our rankings.

You are an avowed Southern-hater from long ago, as everyone who has ever read your long line of posts in that regard knows.

If by that you mean I have never accepted the legitimacy of the Southern rebellion, then I plead guilty.

Your pathologigal hatred blinds you to the fact that the South, upon secession and the adoption of the Constitution of the Confederate States of America, was an independent and sovereign nation, over which Lincoln had no control, other than by conquest.

And your guzzling of the confederate kool-aid by the gallon doesn't make a single thing you said true. Southern secession wasn't legal, their actions were armed rebellion, and they lost. Nothing incorrect in any of that.

Lincoln: America’s first socialist President

How was Lincoln a socialist? I don't see that at all. But I do see similarities between the slave system that was the cornerstone of the Confederacy and the collectivized agriculture that Stalin set up in the late 1920s.

“Southern secession wasn't legal.”

Show me where in the US Constitution secession is prohibited. Hell, there were northern states that wold not have joined the Union if secession had been prohibited.

You strike me as someone who will happily follow Obama into the fascist tyranny he will take this country, and you will gladly forfeit the last of your freedom; and you will brook no dissent, just because it is “the Union.” You remind me of those folks who screamed “My country right or wrong!” several years ago. You're brownshirt material, alright.

Show me where in the US Constitution secession is prohibited. Hell, there were northern states that wold not have joined the Union if secession had been prohibited.

Secession isn't prohibited. Unilateral secession as practiced by the Southern state is. And don't take my word for it. If you refuse to accept the ruling of the Supreme Court in Texas v. White, and confederate contempt for the judiciary is well known, then read up on what James Madison had to say on the subject of unilateral secession. As the man most responsible for the Constitution I would assume you'd agree he knew what he was talking about?

Ah, the last gasp of the Sothron psychotic: it nothing else works accuse your opponent of being a liberal. Nice to see that you're being true to form. No doubt the fact that you can connect a black man to your pejorative is only icing on the cake for you.

“No doubt the fact that you can connect a black man to your pejorative is only icing on the cake for you.”

Say what? Where the hell did that come from? Must be projection. Now I know where you get your screen name from.

As for james Madison, for whom I have a great deal of respect, one would think that if he had intended for secession to be prohibited he would have stuck that in the Constitition somewhere, seeing as he practically drafted the whole thing himself. And it would have been pretty cheeky of him to try to prohibit the very act he and his cohorts employed in creating the United States in the first place: Secession from Great Britain.

The Supreme Court case you cite is an example of the Supreme Court overstepping its authority and ruling on something that the Constitution had never addressed, nor had the legislature. It created law and precedent out of thin air, kind of like it did with Marbury v. Madison, Plessy v. Ferguson, and Roe v. Wade. Even the Dred Scott case was a wrong decision, because it contravened the Missouri Compromise without ever holding that the Missouri Compromise was in whole or in part unconstitutional, which thus made the Dred Scott decision unsustainable save for judicial fiat.

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