The Federalists (the party of Adams and Hamilton) were more Big Government than the Democratic-Republicans (the party of Jefferson and Madison), but it’s something like an argument between today’s traditionalist conservatives and conservatives of a more libertarian bent. ALL of them would be conservative tending more or less to libertarian by today’s standards.
I'm happy to see that some people get this.
It gets tiresome to read that Hamilton and the Federalists were Proto-New Deal Democrats or Proto-Obamas because they supported "big government." The "big government" that Hamilton and the Federalists supported was a protective tariff for America's nascent industries and Federal investment in infrastructure, hardly radical socialist positions. In fact, they were criticized by Anti-Federalists like Jefferson as reactionaries (either Jefferson or Madison accused Hamilton of being a British-style Mercantilist and wanting a monarchy minus the monarch - this puts the Federalists to the Right of the anti-Federalists, not on the Left).
In any case, if only today's political spectrum were made up of Hamiltonian Federalists (traditional conservatives) versus Jeffersonian Anti-Federalists (libertarians), we'd be a big step ahead of what today's Republicans and Democrats have to offer.