Each rose to the crises of his particular time in history.
That said, for me it is a tie between Lincoln and Roosevelt. Lincoln has a slight edge because of his monetary policies. Because he was faced with the need to fight a devastating civil war and pay for it, Lincoln went to the banks. They told him what they would charge by way of interest, and instead he had the United States begin printing its own currency, as it specifies in Article I, section 8 of the US Constitution.
Here's a quote from Ellen Brown's Web of Debt:
Lincoln succeeded in restoring the government’s power to issue the national currency, but his revolutionary monetary policy was opposed by powerful forces. The threat to established interests was captured in an editorial of unknown authorship, said to have been published in The London Times in 1865:
“If that mischievous financial policy which had its origin in the North American Republic during the late war in that country, should become indurated down to a fixture, then that Government will furnish its own money without cost. It will pay off its debts and be without debt. It will become prosperous beyond precedent in the history of the civilized governments of the world. The brains and wealth of all countries will go to North America. That government must be destroyed or it will destroy every monarchy on the globe.”
Lincoln was assassinated in 1865. According to historian W. Cleon Skousen:
“Right after the Civil War there was considerable talk about reviving Lincoln’s brief experiment with the Constitutional monetary system. Had not the European money-trust intervened, it would have no doubt become an established institution.”
The institution that became established instead was the Federal Reserve, a privately-owned central bank given the power in 1913 to print Federal Reserve Notes (or dollar bills) and lend them to the government. The government was submerged in a debt that has grown exponentially since, until it is now an unrepayable $11 trillion. For nearly a century, Lincoln’s statue at the Lincoln Memorial has gazed out pensively across the reflecting pool toward the Federal Reserve building, as if pondering what the bankers had wrought since his death and how to remedy it.
Trivia fact: By 1865, European bankers had been diluting US currency with so much counterfeit money that about 1/3 of all US 'greenbacks' were bogus. This spurred the creation of the Secret Service, which was created to stem the tide of counterfeit currency from these predominantly British banks.
For this reason, I think Lincoln the greater president, because he not only freed slaves and preserved the Union, he kept us from being enslaved by bankers as we are now.
By the way, I recommend Ellen Brown's books. Web of Debt is the best basic explanation, made especially poignant and no less true by all the lies that have been published about Brown's positions.
Public banking...the way to go!
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