To expand on @oratio‘s point, which, if he hadn’t said it, I would have, I wonder why people care so much about trying to read the minds of people long dead? Clearly it’s an appeal to authority, and part of the canonization, if not deification of these iconic figures in American history.
However, anyone can play that game, and insist that they meant this or that. It’s reading tea leaves, same as interpreting the Bible.
If you want to have a discussion of the merits of various sizes of government (assuming you can define government, and “big”), then why not ask directly? Why bring historical figures into it? This is the same mistake that leads to people using the Bible as a way to determine how to relate to computers. I don’t even know if people in the time of the Founding Fathers could even have imagined computers.
Every year is a new year. It is a new year of incredible change. People last year really don’t have much useful for us this year. We are the experts on our time in a way that no one in the past can possibly be.