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You ever hear of the Magna Carta?
The Magna Carta was devised centuries before anyone ever called themselves a 'liberal' in any sense, and was considered a conservative document in that it was taken to simply reiterate the commonly-assumed rights of the Englishman that had existed before the Norman Invasion. It was not, at all, taken to be 'liberal' even by the standards of the day.
The notion that libertarians have some sort of common belief structure is wrong... Classical liberalism falls under libertarian, however so does anarchy (which is an impossible philosophy). Classical liberalism is just a specific idea where one would fall on the political spectrum.
'Classical liberalism' is not libertarian, in any real sense. Yes, the Liberal Party, under Gladstone and others, favored low taxes and less public spending. They also favored channeling what spending there was into social projects; Britain's 'poor houses' were almost entirely constructed under successive Liberal governments, and the People's Budget went into effect under a Liberal government.
About the closest association between 'liberalism' and 'libertarianism' you'll find in the history of English-speaking peoples are the loco focos of New York in the early 19th century. Their influence was small and they never held sway over national politics.
There are no genuine 'classical liberals' among the earliest American Administrations. The Federalists were certainly not 'liberal', classical or otherwise, favoring infrastructure spending and general social conservatism (which, at the time, meant promoting the values of the Anglican/Episcopalian High Church). The Democrats were hawkish and expansionist in the South and favored intensive social campaigns to the benefit of their immigrant Irish and German constituencies in the North. The Whigs had no coherent ideology at all.
The impact of 'classical liberalism' (by which I mean real, ideological liberalism, not "let's throw everything that sounds vaguely libertarian under the same banner") was basically nonexistent in the United States until it was ideologically codified in the 1920s. It was stronger in Britain, but bore even less resemblance to modern libertarianism than American liberalism did.
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