The definition of "conservative" is key to this discussion and "conservative" can mean many different things to different people, times & places.
For examples, in Europe "conservative" often meant monarchist or supporter of official government churches, like the Church of England.
Even fascists claimed to be "conservative" in protecting some traditional values, and of course Communists were only too, too happy to call their fascist fellow socialists "conservative", so the public in general has a distorted view of just what exactly "conservative" means -- -- is it racists, sexists, homophobes, islamophobes, you know, that whole "basket of deplorables"?
No, of course not, not in this country.
For Americans "conservative" boils down to just two words: Constitution and Bible, not necessarily in that order.
If you believe in both as originally intended, then you are an American Conservative, regardless of whatever else ideas you may hold.
So here's the problem for central_va and Democrats in general: from Day One in 1787, the Democrat party began as anti-Federalists, opposed to ratifying the Constitution.
Those anti-Federalists included Thomas Jefferson who went on to lead the anti-Administration faction, in time renaming it the "Democratic Republicans" today's Democrats.
Jefferson's Democrats showed their disregard for the Constitution by proposing Nullification and Interposition to block Federalist laws they didn't like.
But once in the majority, like any typical Democrat, Jefferson expanded Federal powers by, for examples, approving the Louisiana Purchase and authorizing the National Road, today's US-40 from Baltimore to Ohio.
And Democrats after Jefferson expanded Federal powers along with fighting wars & adding territories.
Among the new Democrat powers was the 1850 Compromise which made Fugitive Slave Laws a Federal, not state, responsibility -- how is that even nominally "conservative"?
And speaking of radical, what could be more radical than the SCOTUS Dred Scott decision effectively making all African-Americans (not just the slaves) non-people!
And Democrats with straight faces claimed to be "conservative"?
Of course the first rule of being a Democrat is: you must lie about everything, no truth-telling allowed.
The old Federalists were the party of the Constitution, destroyed by secession talk, succeeded by Whigs who were destroyed by slavery and succeeded by Lincoln's pro-Constitution, anti-secession, anti-slavery Republicans.
Those were the true Conservatives in 1860.
In 1860 Democrats were ruled over by wild eyed Fire Eaters hell-bent on destroying the Union by whatever pretext necessary, the most obvious being slavery.
And while slavery was their biggest complaint it was not the only one -- Robert Rhett said it clearly: having spent the better part of 60 years expanding Federal powers beyond what the Constitution intended, Democrats were now horrified, horrified!! to see all that political power fall into the hands of "Ape" Lincoln and his Black Republicans.
Nothing could be worse, so Democrats did in 1860 what Democrats often do when kicked out of power: they went berserk, and in 1860 that meant secession & war against Black Republicans.
In summary, there was never anything "conservative" about Democrats.
From Day One they were the party of anti-Constitution radicals and have only ever been happy when they themselves rule the roost in Washington, DC.
Power is their drug of choice and without it they go through severe withdrawal agonies, becoming politically insane.
In 1860 just as today.
“The” political spectrum is a set of views on various positions the evolves from the continuing efforts of the two major parties in a U.S.-like two-party system to gain a political advantage. (The U.S., by the way, is the only country in the world with a U.S.-like two-party system.) In this evolution, there are elements of continuity and change.
Jeffersonian Republicans (renamed Democratic Republicans by historians) favored state versus federal government, and freeholders versus manufacturers and bankers. They also favored free trade and the commodity money. Up to the War of 1812, they were inclined to side with France in the interminable conflicts between England and France through the Napoleonic period. In some ways, they were conservative by the present definition of conservative.
Jacksonian Democrats (or simply Democrats), similarly to Jeffersonian Republicans, favored state versus federal government, but were radical. As stated by another, they were for nullification of federal acts. They were also for nullification of court decisions. They did not think a constitution or lifetime judges should stand against the will of the people (at least not as they saw the will of the people). They, like their predecessors, favored free trade and the gold standard. Here, again, they went radical with regard to banks and debt. In Mississippi, they outlawed banks and repudiated debt. Virginia was not only a border state geographically, its Democratic Party never bought into the radical wing of their kin in the deep south. By the time the Jacksonian Democrats emerged, we were in Pax Britiania, so siding with one or the other European power was not an issue. You can see that the conservatism that marked the Jeffersonian Republicans is mixed with radical elements in the Jacksonian Democrats.
The rise of progressivism marked another shift. During the election of 1896, William Jennings Bryan’s brand of radicalism eclipsed the so-called Bourbon or conservative wing of the Democratic Party. Although Bryan lost that election, the Democrats shifted from gold to silver and/or paper money, and from supporting a private-property based, free enterprise system to advocating a progressive income tax and regulation of the economy. They continued to advocate free trade, but this may have reflected the interests of their voters, many of them being farmers. By the time of Woodrow Wilson, getting sucked into European wars in the name of peace and democracy was also part of the agenda. Wilson combined the racism of the Jacksonian Democrats with the pseudoscience of eugenics, as developed in the replacement of Biblical teaching on the basic equality of all human beings with Darwin’s idea that we evolved from monkeys, and some of us not completely.
Modern Democrats take all the bad things of Wilson and make them worse and, furthermore, argue that White people and Jews have evolved too much and are to be hated because of their superiority. They will add Asians to the list of people to hated as soon as they figure out how far evolved they are. I, clinging on to my guns, my Bible and my Constitution, continue to believe that all men are created equal and that the observed differences among the peoples of the Earth reflect natural selection to local conditions not much important to the economic circumstances of today.
You can be stupid and obtuse but you don’t get to redefine words.