Think again.
Abraham Lincoln Was a Liberal, Jefferson Davis Was a Conservative: The Missing Key to Understanding the American Civil War https://www.amazon.com/dp/1943737444/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_tai_rxVYCbJDCACEG
Complete nonsense, but consistent with the vast propaganda effort underway to convince Americans that Lincoln's "Black Republicans" were in fact Liberal Democrats and Jefferson Davis's Slave Power Democrats were in fact conservative Republicans.
The real truth of it is that Republicans in 1860, just as today, were the successor party to the old pro-Constitution Federalist & Whig parties, while Democrats, then as now, opposed the Constitution and supported Nullification, secession & resistance when out of power, then a vastly expanded Federal government when Democrats controlled it.
So one example of "Big Government Republicans" was their support for the first transcontinental railroad, right?
But years earlier "Big Government Democrats" under Secretary of War Jefferson Davis had already spent $10 million on the Gadsden Purchase for a Southern route of the transcontinental railroad -- a route which would have financially benefitted Davis himself.
That's why Republicans in 1860, just as in 2016, ran with the promise to, in effect, "drain the swamp" in DC.
Bottom line: regardless of endless propaganda to the contrary, Democrats have always opposed the Constitution, Republicans support it.
“Unreconstructed Southern historian...” I stopped right there.
Poppycock.