Northerners were increasingly incensed that slavers could come into their states and seize their "property" despite the fact that slavery was illegal. The Compromise of 1850 was deeply unpopular in the North and was spurring the growth of the Republican Party.
What if the Supreme Court had ruled Dred Scott a free man and citizen? Secession may have come sooner. And that would be a gross violation of henkster's law; expecting a Southern majority to so vote. They should have avoided the question, as they initially appeared to be doing, but that just kicks the can down the road.
And what if Buchanan had supported Kansas statehood as a free state? Another violation of henkster's law.
It will be an interesting four years, but I'm increasing thinking there was no peaceful way to settle this other than the North allowing the South to secede. And even in the midst of our most terrible war there was never majority support for that in the North.
I may have mentioned that I am a faculty advisor to the local high school’s “We The People” Citizen and the Constitution class. My particular Unit deals with amendments to the Constitution, and of course we get into issues of the Civil War and the following Amendments. The question I ask them to wrestle with in consultation with Unit 2 (the Constitutional Convention) is whether the Civil War was inevitable as a result of the compromises reached in Philadelphia. Through this annually conducted inquiry I have come to the conclusion that the Civil War was not definitely inevitable as an outcome of the Constitutional Convention, but likely. One man, though, made it inevitable.
He was Eli Whitney.
So yes, I agree with you. By 1857, there was no ruling in Dred Scott v. Sanford that could have simultaneously avoided the Civil War and not violate henkster’s Law. My point in regard to those assailing the concept of Judicial Review is that so far, that power possessed by the Courts is what has kept us from more than one Civil War and an Executive dictatorship. I concede there is a legitimate question whether it continues that function. But I can argue that historically the process of Judicial Review has served that purpose.
As for Dred Scott, that decision revealed the inevitability of the Civil War, as it was the one chance to avert it through the Judicial process. It failed, although things had progressed so far by then Chief Justice Taney had no chance of succeeding.
Say, I hate to prophesy the future (1861) or be a stickler for future inconvenient facts, but in fact "the North" did allow "the South" to secede, peacefully, as Winfield Scott advised Lincoln on March 3, 1861, the North in effect said: "Wayward sisters, depart in peace".
What the North did not allow was the new peacefully formed Confederacy provoking war through dozens of seizures of Federal properties -- forts, ships, arsenals, mints, etc. -- starting war at Fort Sumter (April 12), formally declaring war on the United States (May 6, 1861) and waging war against the Union in Union states like Missouri and Maryland.
On February 18, 1861 Jefferson Davis promised there would be war if "the integrity of our territory and jurisdiction be assailed".
On March 4, Abraham Lincoln promised "In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war.
The government will not assail you.
You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors."
On April 12 Davis decided the Confederacy's integrity was assailed at Fort Sumter, and so launched the assault which Lincoln took as an act of war:
Of course, all that is still years in the future, impossible to say today (February 1857) how such things might eventually play out. ;-)