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John Adams
Free speech: Adams signed the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 during an undeclared naval war with France. The Sedition Act made it a crime to publish 'false, scandalous and malicious' writing against the government, and was used to prosecute Republican newspaper editors and a congressman, Matthew Lyon, who was jailed. Federalists argued the country faced foreign subversion. The backlash helped Jefferson win in 1800, and the act became the textbook example of wartime overreach against dissent.
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Thomas Jefferson
Born
A split record. Jefferson pardoned everyone convicted under the Sedition Act and let it expire, and his Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, written earlier, shaped the First Amendment's approach to church and state. As president, though, he encouraged state prosecutions of hostile Federalist editors, and the Embargo Act enforcement of 1808 used broad search and seizure powers. He enslaved more than 600 people over his lifetime, the starkest gap between his words on liberty and his practice.
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Andrew Jackson
Born
Due process and equal protection, at their worst. Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act of 1830 and pressed forced removals of the Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw and others, culminating in the Trail of Tears, after the Supreme Court in Worcester v Georgia had upheld Cherokee sovereignty. His administration also let the Post Office suppress abolitionist mail in the South. Supporters then cast it as expanding white settlers' democracy; by civil liberties criteria it is among the worst records of any president.
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Abraham Lincoln
Born
Emergency powers in their sharpest form. Lincoln suspended habeas corpus without Congress in 1861, ignored Chief Justice Taney's ruling against it in Ex parte Merryman, and allowed military trials of civilians, later condemned by the Supreme Court in Ex parte Milligan; thousands were detained and opposition newspapers were closed. He argued the Constitution could not survive if the Union did not. Against this stands the Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth Amendment, the greatest expansion of liberty in American history.
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Ulysses S. Grant
Born
Grant used federal power to protect the rights of formerly enslaved people as no president would again for nearly a century. He signed the Enforcement Acts and the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, created the Justice Department in 1870, and suspended habeas corpus in nine South Carolina counties to break the Klan, which led to hundreds of prosecutions. Critics then called it military despotism. Northern fatigue and Supreme Court rulings narrowing the Fourteenth Amendment undid much of it after he left office.
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Woodrow Wilson
Born
Wilson's wartime record is among the worst for free speech: the Espionage Act of 1917 and Sedition Act of 1918 led to around 2,000 prosecutions, including Eugene Debs's ten-year sentence for an anti-war speech, and the Post Office barred radical publications from the mails. The Palmer Raids of 1919 and 1920, under his attorney general, detained thousands of suspected radicals and deported hundreds. He also segregated the federal civil service. The Espionage Act remains in use against leakers today.
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Warren G. Harding
Born
Usually ranked near the bottom for scandal, Harding looks better through this lens. He commuted Eugene Debs's sentence in 1921 and invited him to the White House, released most of the other political prisoners held under Wilson's wartime laws, and in a 1921 speech in Birmingham, Alabama, called for political equality for Black Americans before a segregated audience. He backed a federal anti-lynching bill that passed the House but died in a Senate filibuster.
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Franklin D. Roosevelt
Born
Executive Order 9066 of February 1942 authorised the removal of around 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry, most of them American citizens, from the West Coast to incarceration camps, without charge or hearing. The Supreme Court upheld it in Korematsu in 1944, a decision now repudiated. Roosevelt also expanded FBI domestic surveillance. Against this, his administration's Justice Department created the first civil rights section in 1939, and the Four Freedoms speech set out the case for liberty at home and abroad.
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Harry S. Truman
Born
Truman ordered the desegregation of the armed forces and fair employment in the federal service in 1948, and commissioned the report To Secure These Rights, the first presidential civil rights programme. He also vetoed the McCarran Internal Security Act of 1950, which Congress passed over his veto. Yet his own 1947 loyalty programme screened millions of federal employees for 'disloyalty' on thin evidence, laying groundwork for McCarthyism. Both sides of the record matter.
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Dwight D. Eisenhower
Born
Eisenhower sent the 101st Airborne to Little Rock in 1957 to enforce school desegregation, the first federal troops sent to the South to protect Black citizens' rights since Reconstruction, and signed the Civil Rights Act of 1957. He appointed Earl Warren and William Brennan to the Supreme Court. On the other side, his 1953 executive order expanded loyalty screening to dismiss federal employees, including thousands of gay men and lesbians in the 'Lavender Scare', and he avoided confronting McCarthy publicly for too long.
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Lyndon B. Johnson
Born
On equal protection and voting rights Johnson has no rival: the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968. The other ledger is surveillance. His FBI under J. Edgar Hoover continued wiretapping Martin Luther King Jr., COINTELPRO operations expanded against civil rights and anti-war groups, and the Army spied on domestic protesters. The record shows how a president can transform rights in law while his agencies violate them in practice.
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Richard Nixon
Born
Nixon kept an 'enemies list', used the IRS and FBI against opponents, approved the White House unit that broke into Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office and tried to stop the Pentagon Papers' publication, which the Supreme Court rejected as prior restraint. Watergate followed. Yet he ended the draft, supported the 26th Amendment lowering the voting age to 18, ratified in 1971, and his administration enforced school desegregation in the South more effectively than any before it. The abuses led directly to the reforms of the 1970s.
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Gerald Ford
Born
Ford formally rescinded Executive Order 9066 in 1976 with a proclamation calling the internment of Japanese Americans a mistake, and issued the first executive order banning political assassination by US agencies, responding to the Church Committee. He also offered clemency to Vietnam draft evaders and deserters, through a conditional programme. His pardon of Nixon is the counterweight: it ended any prospect of a prosecution that might have tested a president's accountability for abuses of power.
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Jimmy Carter
Born
Carter signed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, which for the first time required a court warrant for national security wiretaps on US soil, and the Inspector General Act. On his first full day in office he pardoned Vietnam draft evaders unconditionally. Civil libertarians later criticised the secret FISA court as too compliant with government requests. Of the reform-era presidents he did the most to put limits on intelligence agencies into law.
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Ronald Reagan
Born
Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, which formally apologised for the internment of Japanese Americans and paid $20,000 to each surviving detainee, after initially opposing it. Executive Order 12333 of 1981, which still governs much US intelligence collection, expanded agencies' latitude abroad. His administration's war on drugs and support for mandatory minimum sentences in 1986 drove a surge in incarceration, and his slow response to the AIDS epidemic is widely criticised.
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George H. W. Bush
Born
The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, which Bush signed and championed, is the most significant extension of civil rights protection since the 1960s, banning discrimination against disabled people in employment, public services and accommodation. He also signed the Civil Rights Act of 1991 after vetoing an earlier version. His 1988 campaign's Willie Horton advertisement and his support for a flag-burning constitutional amendment after the Supreme Court protected it as speech are the counterweights.
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Bill Clinton
Born
Clinton's record is mixed by these criteria. He signed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 and the motor voter law expanding registration. He also signed 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' and the Defense of Marriage Act, the 1994 crime bill, and the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, which sharply limited federal habeas corpus review for state prisoners. Civil libertarians regard that habeas restriction as one of the most damaging legislative changes of the era.
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George W. Bush
Born
After 9/11 Bush signed the USA PATRIOT Act, authorised the NSA's warrantless surveillance programme, opened the Guantánamo Bay detention camp outside normal legal process and approved 'enhanced interrogation' that the Senate later documented as torture. The Supreme Court rejected key parts in Hamdi, Rasul and Boumediene, holding that detainees had rights to challenge their detention. His administration argued the threat required wartime powers. He also spoke against anti-Muslim prejudice in the days after the attacks.
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Barack Obama
Born
Obama banned enhanced interrogation by executive order on his second day and repealed 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' in 2010. But he failed to close Guantánamo, expanded drone strikes including the 2011 killing of the American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki without trial, prosecuted more leakers under the Espionage Act than all predecessors combined, and defended NSA bulk collection until Edward Snowden's 2013 disclosures forced the USA Freedom Act of 2015. Civil libertarians were among his sharpest critics.
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Donald Trump
Born
Trump's first term brought the travel ban on several Muslim-majority countries, upheld by the Supreme Court in its third version in 2018, and family separation at the border. His second term, from 2025, invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport alleged gang members with minimal hearings, a use courts repeatedly challenged, expanded immigration detention and deployed National Guard troops to cities over governors' objections. Supporters argue these are lawful uses of emergency and immigration powers; the legal fights are continuing.
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