What if the key to understanding the American Civil War lies in the political meanings of "Liberal" and "Conservative" during the 19th Century?In Abraham Lincoln Was a Liberal, Jefferson Davis Was a Conservative, award-winning Civil War scholar and Southern historian Colonel Lochlainn Seabrook challenges conventional interpretations of America's most destructive conflict.Seabrook explains that the platforms of the nation's two principal political parties during the 1860s differed dramatically from their modern positions. He identifies Abraham Lincoln and the Republican Party with centralized government and expanding federal power, while associating Jefferson Davis and the Democratic Party with states' rights, constitutionalism, and limited government. Viewed through this political framework, the war becomes a struggle not only between North and South, but between two competing visions of American government.Written in clear, accessible language, this groundbreaking study traces the development of America's two-party system, examines the nation's presidential elections, and explores the changing identities and platforms of its political parties. Special attention is given to the critical period from 1828 to 1896, when party names, coalitions, and principles underwent profound changes.Supported by more than 600 notes, a 1,000-book bibliography, hundreds of contemporary eyewitness statements, and an extensive collection of 19th-Century photographs and campaign posters, the book offers readers a thoroughly documented alternative interpretation of Civil War politics. Four appendices provide helpful lists and charts that make this complex subject understandable to general readers, students, and scholars alike.Provocative, meticulously researched, and unlike any other Civil War study, Abraham Lincoln Was a Liberal, Jefferson Davis Was a Conservative invites readers to reconsider what they have been taught about Lincoln, Davis, the Union, the Confederacy, and the political forces behind America's Great War.A companion volume to Colonel Seabrook's Lincoln's War The Real Cause, the Real Winner, the Real Loser.