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.
And si vis bellum, para bellum immo. Works that way, too.
That would be a reasonable caution if I were doing it, and perhaps a transgression into teleology; but well before the war we saw Lincoln in the U.S. House, sitting at the knee of John Quincy Adams as he expounded on the subject of "reorganizing" the South by force in case of a contest of wills, and of theoretical justifications for coercing a State by armed force.
Put that together with what happened later, and it's hard to resist the conclusion (which we're entitled to draw, since Lincoln so doggedly persisted in habitually concealing his real intentions in any sitation and in going out of his way to exclude Congress and other nosy nobodies from the shaping and executing of his agenda) that the outcome of the Civil War was exactly what Lincoln intended, and that a large part of his success lay in never letting people know what he intended in full, so that (like good Alinskyites today) he could avoid the tactical and political trammels of any moral onus that might flow from his deeds, and indeed ascribe the People's sufferings to Judgments of God.
Which he did.