Presidents Day has come and gone, and mattress sales have sprung along. Presidents Day is always chiefly about Abraham Lincoln (and not, say, Grover Cleveland), in part because it falls on or near Lincoln's birthday (Feb. 12), in part because Lincoln's visage is the most recognizable in American history and in part because Lincoln is widely regarded as the greatest president.

This year, because it was the bicentennial of Lincoln's birth, was a kind of Abe-session. Dozens of new books have been published to mark the occasion, including Ronald C. White's outstanding "Lincoln: A Biography."

For a few days, PBS seemed to be all Lincoln, all of the time. On the 16th president's actual birthday, I happened to be at the University of Vermont in Burlington. At 2:12 p.m., bells were scheduled to ring all across America in honor of the "great emancipator."

With three UVM historians, I stood out in the rain for 10 minutes listening to the tolling of the bells. It was extremely moving - if really cold and really wet - and none of us felt that we would be paying proper respect if we huddled under an umbrella. Approximately 1,000 students walked past us during our vigil wondering what kind of morons stand out bareheaded in freezing rain 10 feet from a warm, dry student center.

Ah, but it was the tintinnabulation of the bells, bells, bells. Bells.

Historians always bristle and grumble when they are asked to rank presidents, but they secretly enjoy it, because it's fun and it permits them to make sweeping judgments about American history. This year, C-SPAN asked the usual suspects to weigh in.

Lincoln came in first (duh). Then George Washington, Franklin Roosevelt and Theodore Roosevelt, in that order. This ranking vindicates Gutzon Borglum's Mount Rushmore choices, more or less, though it removes the increasingly problematic Jefferson and replaces him with Theodore's fifth cousin Franklin Roosevelt, the only president elected four times.

Jefferson ranked seventh in this poll, after Truman and Kennedy. I disagree heartily with ranking Kennedy so high (so deep runs the Kennedy mystique), and I'm surprised that Jefferson was not thrust well back into the pack.

Jefferson's reputation has been in steady decline for the past 20 years for a variety of reasons. Jefferson's tortured attitudes towards race and slavery have been the central focus of recent biographies and studies, as well as his Indian policy, which set in motion the twin pillars of 19th century expansionism: removal and assimilation.

There also is Sally Hemings, of course, and the recent emphasis on the Machiavellian tendencies in Jefferson's political life. The dark side of Jefferson has tended recently to eclipse such minor achievements as the Declaration of Independence, the Louisiana Purchase, the Virginia Statute for Religious Liberty and the University of Virginia.

Jefferson has become the poster child for the unresolved race issues of American history. I doubt that it would be possible to chisel his face on Mount Rushmore today.

For the record, I believe that much of the current disillusionment with Jefferson is unfair. For all of his inconsistencies, Jefferson is, to my mind, the most important figure of the founding generation of American history.

More effectively than anybody else, he laid out the ideals of American life and the essential dreaminess of the American experiment. He taught us that the president must be an aspirational figure who believes, as Ronald Reagan (ranked 10th) put it, that "it is morning in America again." You cannot come to terms with America unless you wrestle with Jefferson. This is not true of Monroe, of the two Adamses, or even of Washington.

The C-SPAN historians ranked George W. Bush 36th of the 42 presidents in the poll. This is pretty harsh - and a little hasty, of course. Only time will tell, but everyone seems to agree that it does not look good for the younger Bush, who comes out slightly ahead of the pantheon of American ignominy: Millard Fillmore, Warren Harding, William Henry Harrison (who died after one month in office), Franklin Pierce, Andrew Johnson (impeached but not convicted) and James Buchanan (dead last).

Bill Clinton ranks 18th in the C-SPAN historians' poll, flanked by John Quincy Adams and James Madison, both of whom, as Gerald Ford once put it, if they were alive today would be rolling over in their graves.

Madison, after all, is the author of the Bill of Rights and the father of the U.S. Constitution. J.Q. Adams was arguably the greatest secretary of state in American history. It was Adams who squared off what became North Dakota in 1818, at the 49th parallel, instead of leaving the watershed boundary of the Louisiana Purchase in place. Without Adams' diplomacy, the whole Sheyenne and Red River watershed of North Dakota might now be Baja Manitoba.

The point, I suppose, is that the historians are ranking presidencies, not presenting lifetime achievement awards. If they were, J.Q. Adams, as well as his illustrious father, would rank very high. These rankings remind us that great presidents are not always great in other respects (Lincoln, Truman) and some of America's greatest men (Jefferson, Madison, Adams I and II, Ulysses S. Grant) have been undistinguished presidents.

I was delighted to see that Roosevelt ranks fourth in the estimation of America's premier historians. He was a great man and a great president. If he were alive to respond, he'd call it a bully good poll, but he would also surely stand back, a little forlornly, to admit that he was never really tested as president by a great national "predicament" (you can hear him clicking off the word) - a war or fundamental diplomatic impasse or economic catastrophe.

He was glad to preside over seven years and 171 days of peace and general progress, but he knew, because he was arguably the best read and best prepared of all American presidents, that true greatness should be reserved for those, like his distant cousin, who carry America safely through periods of grave crisis.

Whether this will bump George W. Bush up the poll a little over time remains to be seen.

(Clay Jenkinson is the director of the Dakota Institute. He also is the Theodore Roosevelt Scholar-in-residence at Dickinson State University. He lives in Bismarck. Contact Clay at Jeffysage@;aol.com.)