You'd win that bet, lg. Pay up, non-seq. From Link:
Letter to E. B. Washburne
(Confidential.)
SPRINGFIELD, ILLINOIS, December 21, 1860.
My dear Sir: Last night I received your letter giving an account of your interview with General Scott, and for which I thank you. Please present my respects to the general, and tell him, confidentially, I shall be obliged to him to be as well prepared as he can to either hold or retake the forts, as the case may require, at and after the inauguration.
Yours as ever,
A. LINCOLN
Can anyone read that letter, or look at the shenanigans in Missouri using the Illinois state government, a serving line officer of the U.S. Army, and the Wide-Awake waffen, and then tell us with a straight face that Abraham Lincoln had any other policy toward the South than to war them all down and "reorganize" their governments and politics by coup d'etat?
The best the Southerners could have hoped for was what Missouri and Maryland got: entire governments in prison and whole states under military occupation, according to the plan forecast by John Quincy Adams for bringing the South and West to heel -- the Yankee bastard.
When did anyone ever dream up doing something like that to Massachusetts?
But the Bay State men dreamed it up, they helped carry it into execution, and now 145 years later, they squat comfortably and confidently atop their carrion bonepiles and declaim to us about morality and good government and what our politics ought to be.
Now I know why there is a hell.
ROTFLMAO!!!! What part of "at and after the inauguration" did you fail to understand? Lincoln wasn't giving Scott instructions before then.