based primarily on the fact that, during my limited public primary schooling, basically what I learned of Thomas Jefferson was that he was a glorified secretary who wielded the pen while everyone ELSE dreamed up America. So I willingly concede the possibility that Teddy R. was, in fact, one of the 5-10 greatest US Presidents :-)
Regarding the public's acceptance of the four featured famous figures' faces (alliteration!) on Mt. Rushmore, I think Washington's primacy and Jefferson's vision (if not solely for the Louisiand Purchase, which was one of the greatest double-edged-swords in human political history) deserve to be there on their own merits. Perhaps I'm too cynical, but I think it's entirely reasonable to expect that most people would happily accept the 'party line' presented in the vast majority of US history textbooks. That line says, in no uncertain terms, that Abraham Lincoln abolished slavery while the South was populated entirely by backward, oppressive, basically evil people who didn't understand the first thing about human rights and were somehow indoctrinated into thinking that African slaves weren't really people. (<--- is just so one-dimensional that any adult would see through it if it was presented like this, but an impressionable young mind is designed to accept the inputs made by authority figures, such as parents or teachers). We all grow up with the whole 'Abe Lincoln was a humanitarian!' shtick echoing in our ears, so the idea that he might have been our worst tyrant (which is pretty easily established, actually) creates so much dissonance that we're conditioned to automatically reject the idea. But when you realize that his 'Civil War' was (which, according to a Texan friend of mine, is still taught as the War of Northern Aggression in Texas schools) was responsible for more American deaths, by percentage of the population, than all other wars the USA has engaged in COMBINED it's hard to see him for anything but a tyrant.
So apparently my formatting skills are feeble. Here's a link to the Wikipedia page with the US Military's death totals for the various wars in American history. Here are the rough numbers of US deaths in the major wars of the 20th Century:
World War II: 405,399
World War I: 116,516
Vietnam War: 59,246
Korean War: 54,246
Subtotal: 635,407 American lives
(As an aside: the War of Terror, the longest running war in American history, has cost 6,717 Americans their lives)
The other members of the top ten wars in US history (Revolutionary War, War of 1812, Mexican-American War and Philippine-American War) total about 55,000. So, adding all of the non-Civil War deaths together, we end up with a grand total of approximately:
697,124 (let's round it up to 700,000 American lives lost in non-Civil War actions)
The US Civil War, according to the US Military's best, most verifiable information, totals 750,000 deaths (and, as I said above, that number is being pushed well over a million by recent record discoveries according to several sites I read a year or two ago).
So, less-than-succinctly, Abraham Lincoln's 'Civil War' was the single-most devastating action in American history when tallied in terms of American lives lost -- but that was perhaps predictable since it was a war being waged entirely BY Americans ON Americans. The part that makes it shocking is that, even without including the new numbers which historians are keen to add to the 750,000 number, it still outweighs EVERY OTHER WAR IN AMERICAN HISTORY COMBINED in terms of death toll :-( Think on that for a moment while you somberly realize that, at the time of the 'Civil War,' the US census showed a total population of 31,443,000. That makes the official death toll 2.35% of the entire nation's population. If you include the newer numbers, the total death count rises to nearly DOUBLE that of every other war in American history combined :-(
Lincoln was a tyrant.
When he was unable to arrive at a diplomatic solution to the growing rift between the North and South, he resorted to raising an army (an act which was, in and of itself, deemed unconstitutional at the time if my information is correct) and marching on his own citizens. We'd be ashamed of any modern president doing this to ANOTHER country (even one that was more or less filled with Bad Guys (tm) ) let alone his own, and yet here we all sit, gladly accepting just how great Honest Abe was :-(
My little sad face emoticons cannot come close to conveying the profound sorrow and loss that I feel when thinking about Lincoln's impact on the USA and, by extension, on the rest of human history. When he marched on the South, he didn't *just* kill those ~million citizens...he destroyed the framework which made American the greatest country in the history of the world by removing the states' rights to self-regulate -- a removal which, again, was enacted using military force in an unconstitutional abuse of power never even rivaled before or since in our nation's brief history.
There, my rant is done. I'll go ahead and pile up some dry wood and wait patiently while y'all fetch your torches and pitchforks ;-)