The question as to whether the (First) American Revolution was driven by conservative or liberal political doctrines is a good one for graduate and undergraduate classes in history. An effective argument can always be made that the leaders of the American Revolution wanted to return to the kind of political relationship that existed between the colonies and the crown prior to the Treaty of Paris which ended the Seven Years War. Edmund Burke, the great English conservative who supported the colonists, recognized that they simply wanted to return to the status quo before the imposition of taxes.

Again, and again, revert to your old principles—seek peace and ensue it—leave America, if she has taxable matter in her, to tax herself. I am not here going into the distinctions of rights, nor attempting to mark their boundaries. I do not enter into these metaphysical distinctions; I hate the very sound of them. Leave the Americans as they antiently stood, and these distinctions, born of our unhappy contest, will die along with it. They, and we, and their and our ancestors, have been happy under that system. Let the memory of all actions, in contradiction to that good old mode, on both sides, be extinguished for ever. Be content to bind America by laws of trade; you have always done it. Let this be your reason for binding their trade. Do not burthen them by taxes; you were not used to do so from the beginning. Let this be your reason for not taxing. These are the arguments of states and kingdoms. Leave the rest to the schools; for there only they may be discussed with safety. But if, intemperately, unwisely, fatally, you sophisticate and poison the very source of government, by urging subtle deductions, and consequences odious to those you govern, from the unlimited and illimitable nature of supreme sovereignty, you will teach them by these means to call that sovereignty itself in question. When you drive him hard, the boar will surely turn upon the hunters. If that sovereignty and their freedom cannot be reconciled, which will they take? They will cast your sovereignty in your face. No body will be argued into slavery. Sir, let the gentlemen on the other side call forth all their ability; let the best of them get up, and tell me, what one character of liberty the Americans have, and what one brand of slavery they are free from, if they are bound in their property and industry, by all the restraints you can imagine on commerce, and at the same time are made pack-horses of every tax you choose to impose, without the least share in granting them?

"Speech on American Taxation", Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, 2:458.

Burke, Jefferson, Washington, Franklin and others were appalled by the great liberal revoltion thier time, the one in France. Thomas Paine, a true American liberal, was in complete support of the Jacobins in France.

Two books will help fill in the relevant details. Michael Lind, What Lincoln Believed: The Values of America's Greatest President has an excellent chapter on Lincoln's America, how his government's political aims advanced the economy and political power of the sixteen states in the northeast ("the nation") during the decade which followed his death. Both Lind and Kevin Phillips, The Cousins' Wars: Religion, Politics, Civil Warfare, And The Triumph Of Anglo-America also explain the extent of economic, commercial and political destruction in the South, which did not begin to recover from the Civil War and the effects of certain Federal policies until after the end of the Great Depression. President Roosevelt, the first President to spend much time visiting the Southern states or pay much atention to them since the Civil War, formed a commission to identify and reverse these politicies in 1937-38.