That point can't be made often enough. He stood in the tradition of Hamilton, Jay, and the other counterrevolutionaries who wanted to reestablish Georgian government, without George III himself, in America, so that in that sense he could be understood to be "conservative" in the sense that Frederick the Great, Thomas Hobbes, and Cardinal Torquemada were. But when we talk about conservatives, we're talking about Jeffersonians, Antifederalists, and modern, Goldwaterite conservatives -- all of whom are 18th-century liberals, and followers of John Locke and the writers of the Enlightenment.
So the easy way to remember it: conservatives, children of the Enlightenment. Liberals, enthusiasts of feudalism (absolute power, revocable property, nonexistent rights), despotism (as in, "enlightened despot" -- which is what they call Louis XIV and Frederick), and illimitable government power (Hobbes's "Leviathan"), the "power to do good".
Lincoln stood with the Hamiltonian reactionaries, and his line descends politically to today's "big-government conservatives" (now there's an oxymoron), liberal statists, and Rockefeller Republicans ("me-too'ers", topsiders, white-shoe/Wall Street Republicans, plantation liberals, yacht-clubbers, gold-plated b*stards, RINO's).
I don't consider him all that much of a Statesman either; he got pretty d*mn near a million Americans killed in a war that a Statesman probably could have avoided.
I've been boring people upthread with my opinion that Lincoln sought the war deliberately, because he knew he could more easily get around the Constitution during the alarums of a war, and get the cooperation of a rump Congress.
Seems to have been a popular strategy ever since as well.