"The principles of Jefferson are the definitions and axioms of free society. And yet they are denied and evaded with no small show of success...All honor to Jefferson — to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document an abstract truth, applicable to all men at all times, and so to embalm it there, that today, and in all coming days, it should be a rebuke and a stumbling block to the very harbingers of reappearing tyranny and oppression." -- Abraham Lincoln, 1859
“The principles of Jefferson are the definitions and axioms of free society. And yet they are denied and evaded with no small show of success...All honor to Jefferson — to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document an abstract truth, applicable to all men at all times, and so to embalm it there, that today, and in all coming days, it should be a rebuke and a stumbling block to the very harbingers of reappearing tyranny and oppression.” — Abraham Lincoln, 1859
If the above is Lincoln’s real and total view of Jefferson then Lincoln must have respected Jefferson greatly. However, in 1859 Lincoln was considering how he would attack Jefferson’s South if elected president. Lincoln likely wanted to “capture” Jefferson and use Jefferson’s reputation to brand 1859 Southerners as “rebels” opposed to everything for which Mr. Jefferson stood.
Lincoln was a cold, calculating politician. Even today it is hard to know how much of what Lincoln said is to be believed, and how much should be discounted. All we know for sure is the 600,000 dead.