Looking at the electoral results in the years up to the Civil War (see here), I don't think it's too fanciful to imagine a situation in which a combination of a pro-slavery President and a Supreme Court stacked in such a way that it ruled that it was unconstitutional for states to deny citizens the right to own slaves, could have had the kind of outcome that I imagined in that last post I made.

Nothing inevitable about a federal government being on the side of the angels when it comes to racism or anything else.