If they were all about peace, why the war preparations, unless they were about war, a grand crusade to destroy the South and take the country's affairs into very profitable receivership?
No secret meeting may have been necessary, but the meetings continued, in hushed and rushed circumstances, right up to the fall of Fort Sumter.
So much yearning for peace, and yet so many secret meetings, so many quartermasters and militia commanders so hard at work, so many unspoken plans and conjurations.
Yes, that has peace written all over it. Well before Lincoln took the oath, too.
Si vis pacem, para bellum. A famous phrase. I'm not going to fault people for trying to be prepared for different contingencies. There'd be more to fault if they didn't.
Beyond that what you're doing is taking the result of a war as the goal people had before they even went to war. Clearly, that's not always true. In spite of what I've heard around here last week, the colonists in 1775 weren't aiming at independence.
In 1914 Britain probably wasn't aiming at overturning Germany's monarch any more that Germany was intending to overturn Russia's. Such events were results that were barely conceivable before the war began. Leaders started from the existing situation and took action to prevent conditions from getting worse or their side from collapsing, not to fulfill some great master plan.
I could just as easily turn your worldview on its head, and say that Lincoln didn't intend any great revolution in Southern life. He had friends in the South from his Congressional days. His wife was from a slaveowning family. In a sense, Lincoln was Southern-born himself, and believed his ancestry to be Southern.
Lincoln thought he understood the South and believed that underneath all the enmity and animosity that most Southerners were still loyal and would respond to a firm and decided, but peaceful action, and then things could go back to what they were (with only the question of the territories finally resolved in his side's favor). I don't know if that's the truth or the whole truth, but I doubt it's further from the actual truth than your conspiracy theory.
So much yearning for peace, and yet so many secret meetings, so many quartermasters and militia commanders so hard at work, so many unspoken plans and conjurations.
So much on the other side as well. Got to dig out Davis's day book and find out what he was up to at the time before casting aspersions.