Could the Civil War have been avoided if Jackson had been President in 1861?

[sparkey]

Considering that the immediate cause of the Civil War was the secession of Southern states in response to the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860, it's pretty obvious that the Civil War would not have begun when it did if an Andrew Jackson-like candidate (maybe Douglas? or Andrew Johnson?) won in 1860. The real question is how long it would take Republicans to eventually win an election, and how long (and if) the South would liberalize on its own. The North was more electorally powerful than the South, so if they won within an election or two, then the Civil War may have just started an election or two later. If it took a generation or so, then prospects are better, because Southern society was getting more and more influence from Northern education at the time, although it's also possible that the South could have reacted to that trend by entrenching its position more.

Perhaps a perpetual Andrew Jackson would have prevented Civil War, but he may have prevented abolition as well.

[sparkey]

Jackson being a southerner and a slaveowner of the landed plantation class would have tried to work a deal but in the end like many others of 1860-61 would have said screw it and sided with the secessionists.

I wouldn't take this as a given. Jackson had very harsh words for Calhoun, purportedly: "John Calhoun, if you secede from my nation, I will secede your head from the rest of your body." Jackson was in many ways a prototypical Southern Unionist, and many pro-Union Southern Democrats called themselves "Jackson Democrats" during the Civil War era. Tennessee was also the Confederate state with the most Unionists. Genuine Jacksonians were a bit of a dying breed by the Civil War, but one obvious and famous one, Andrew Johnson, was himself a Tennessee Unionist.