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Whether the Civil War was inevitable or not is a still on-going debate, and thus it is very hard to think of something anyone could have done to prevent it from happening. So, I'll divide my answer into two: could the Civil War have been avoided? And if so, what could Buchanan have done to prevent or delay it?

Slavery, as anyone who knows anything about the Civil War can say, was at the core of the conflict. But the extent to which it was so central is often underestimated. The South was not merely a society with slavery, it was a slave society. Slavery was central to the Southern society, economy, identity and power, and as a result the South did everything it could to perpetuate their peculiar institution and extend it. Southerners were convinced that slavery needed expansion to survive, and agreed with anti-slavery northerners who thought that, once contained, slavery would slowly perish. The South simply could not allow this, and for this they changed from thinking of slavery as a peculiar institution to a political blessing.

This put them into direct conflict with the North, and their ideology of "Free Labor". Free Labor, at its core, believes that a society where everyone has equal opportunity for advancement and self-improvement is destined for greatness, both economic and social. Republicans looked at the North and were proud of what they saw: a dynamic economy where everyone had a chance to improve their condition. The Cincinnati Gazette, for example, proudly declared that "Of all the multitude of young men engaged in various employments of this city, there is probably not one who does not desire, and even confidently expect, to become rich, and that at an early day." They believed Northern society was the way towards progress, and firm believers of American exceptionalism such as Seward thought that the US's destiny was to spread this kind of civilization. The North was, to them, the most democratic and free society in the whole world.

But when Northerners looked at the South they saw the antithesis of everything they envisioned: a hierarquichal society with strict social lines, lorded over by a small clique of slavocrats while the common man languished in poverty. Slavery, for them, was the principal reason behind the South's backwardness. Seward, after travelling through Virginia, would say that "in every respect, an absence of enterprise and improvement, distinguish the region through which we have come, in contrast to that in which we live". An Iowa Republican had similar feelings: "Slavery withers and blights all it touches . . . slavery is a foul political curse upon the institutions of our country; it is a curse upon the soil of the country, and worse than that, it is a curse upon the poor, free, laboring white man."

For their part, Southerners were horrified of Northern society, which they saw as plagued by “hireling labor, pauperism, rowdyism, mobism, and anti-rentism." “Ours is an agricultural people, and God grant that we may continue so. It is the freest, happiest, most independent, and with us, the most powerful condition on earth” wrote an Alabamian. They rejoiced in being agricultural, and rejoiced in slavery as the institution that allowed them to live happily and lead in "progress, civilization, and refinement" while the slaves toiled.

Both societies were in direct conflict with each other, especially because both sections believed that their system of society ought to become the American system. Republicans believed in the "Slave Power", a theory that held that the Slave states banded together to protect and extend slavery, which in turn limited the growth and power of the nation. And when you see the disproportionate power the South had in Congress, the fact that a majority of Supreme Court Justices and Presidents were Southerners, and the events of the 1850's, it's easy to come to the same conclusion. At the same time, Southerners felt threatened by the greater and speedier growth of the North in economy, population and influence. Both sections have come to believe that sooner or later either free or slave society would have to triumph.

That's what made the Republican Party so inacceptable for the South. A whole party founded on the principle that slavery was a moral wrong was an existential threat to the South. Martin van Buren already recognized in 1848 that the principle of Free Soil (that the territories should be free of slavery) was a threat: "The prohibition carries with it a reproach to the slaveholding states, and . . . submission to it would degrade them." To submit to the Republicans would result in the eventual destruction of slavery, and thus everything they cherished: family, home, and White supremacy. To be sure, even the most radical Republicans did not want to go beyond the Constitution, and thus would respect slavery in the states where it already existed. But if a Republican took the Presidency he would be able to limit slavery's expansion, build a Southern Republican Party, and do much more. Panic only rose after John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry, which made many Southerners believe that a Republican victory would result in violent slave uprising, a vision that haunted many nightmares.

Northern society felt similarly threatened by the Slave Power, which they believed would force them to accept slavery. The infamous Dred Scott decision seemed to be a preview of this, together with the Lecompton debate during bleeding Kansas, when the South almost managed to get Kansas accepted into the Union as a slave state despite the fact that the great majority of the settlers there opposed slavery. As Lincoln said, "we shall lie down pleasantly dreaming that the people of Missouri are on the verge of making their State free; and we shall awake to the reality, instead, that the Supreme Court has made Illinois a slave State."

Northerners believed they had to fight against slavery and the Slave Power as a corrupting influence, which would take the territories and bring to them "a blight whose fatal influence will be felt for centuries." They risked the destruction of their society, and with that the democracy, free enterprise and liberty that they so cherished. Their only option was limiting slavery's expansion, which would ultimately bring its gradual and constitutional end. But the South could not allow this, because this risked their hierchacal society based on slavery and White Supremacy. North and South had different visions of what the United States should be, and these visions were in direct conflict. Only one could triumph. And when the North elected a Republican, the South decided that it couldn't submit, and seceded, ultimately assuring that "the northern vision would become the American vision", as McPherson says.

The only way to prevent these differing visions from colliding was ignoring the Slavery Question, as the Union did for most of its history. Whigs and Democrats, by mutual agreement, had decided to keep slavery out of national politics. But greater consciousness due in part to the religious Second Great Awakening led to the rise of moral anti-slavery, which opposed slavery as not only something bad economically, but a sin. The North, for its part, industrialized and grew, and started to see Slave Society as something wrong. Political anti-slavery, based on the argument that the Founders intended for slavery to eventually end, rose in prominence. And finally, slavery could not be ignored, with event after event raising the point and ultimately leading to the destruction of the Two Party system and the rise of the Republicans as an anti-slavery coalition.

By 1856, when Buchanan was elected, the only way to prevent Civil War would be for the slavery question to be ignored once again and the Republicans to disband, but slavery had become so central to national politics and so controversial that it was simply impossible. Many tried, such as the Know-Nothings who wanted to replace anti-slavery with nativism, but they too failed because Southern Know-Nothings demanded acceptance of slavery, something Northern Know-Nothings could not and would not accept. By that point, the election of any Republican, no matter how moderate, would have resulted in Southern secession, and since the North could not allow such a repudiation of democracy and the destruction of the nation, it would have started a Civil War as well. Southerners already threatened to secede if Frémont won in 1856; in 1860, the only Compromise that had any chance of averting war was an unconditional surrender that the North would never accept. As Lincoln pointed out, "If we surrender, it is the end of us. They will repeat the experiment upon us ad libitum. A year will not pass, till we shall have to take Cuba as a condition upon which they will stay in the Union." A Democratic victory in 1860 would have only delayed secession.

Then, what's the conclusion? Was the Civil War inevitable? In my opinion, yes it was. Northern and Southern society were fundamentally opposed. The North, many historians and contemporaries observed, was essentially against slavery, but for most of history it was not willing to embark of an abolition crusade because it was confident that slavery would not affect them and that it would ultimately end. The North could not support or tolerate Southern dreams of empire and ambitions for expansion, and this became an existential threat to them and their society. For the South, this resistance, exemplified in the formation of the Republican Party, represented a threat towards the Southern way of life. Ultimately one vision would have to triumph, because either slavery was accepted as something good and allowed to expand, or it was accepted as something bad and contained. And the North's greater resources and population presaged that the Northern vision would triumph at the end.