If anyone from the Civil War era is responsible for more centralization of government, it is the Confederates, who gave secession and state power a bad name. Moreover, there is nothing libertarian about preferring regional tyrants bent on preserving slavery to the man who was more responsible than anyone for the 13th Amendment. And I challenge you to name a more libertarian Supreme Court justice than Lincoln appointee Stephen J. Fields. Here is how prominent libertarian David Friedman (son of Milton) described Fields in a 1998 article in Liberty:
"During Field's thirty-five years on the Supreme Court, he argued, mostly in minority opinions, for strict limits on the ability of governments to regulate and redistribute -- to establish monopolies, set prices, impose special taxes on disfavored industries. By the end of his term his position had finally become the majority view -- and remained so for the next forty years, until overthrown during the New Deal. When Justice Holmes, in his famous dissent in Lochner v. New York , complained that the majority was reading Herbert Spencer's Social Statistics into the Constitution, it was Stephen Field, six years dead, whom he was attacking."
I find it hard to believe that an "American Lenin" would appoint such a champion of freedom. (By the way, when Lincoln was President, the federal government, despite a very expensive effort to crush a Southern slaveholderocracy, never spent more than 16% of the gross national product, and federal spending dropped to less than 5% of GNP shortly after the war. It was not until FDR's "New Deal" tenure that the federal budget began to rise to the absurd modern peacetime levels in excess of 20%.) You can't blame Lincoln for FDR and the free-spending DemocRepublicans of the 20th (and 21st) Century.