No, before the 1856 presidential election there were never "two sides" because there was never an anti-slavery party.
All the parties -- Democrats, Federalists, Whigs, "Know Nothings", etc. -- included voters & representatives from the Deep South to the Northeast.
For examples, three of four Whig presidents -- Harrison, Tyler & Taylor were Southern born slaveholders.
No major party before 1856 expressly opposed slavery.
Consider, in 1787, when Thomas Jefferson proposed, and Congress enacted, abolition in the Northwest Territories there was no major Southern opposition.
In 1820 Congress again addressed the Territories issue with the Missouri Compromise, about which Virginia Congressman John Randolph famously coined the term "Doughfaced Northerners" meaning Northerners who were happy to do what Southerners demanded.
Democrat President Buchanan (1857-1861) was arguably the last of the Northern Doughfaces.
Northern Doughfaces were a major reason there were not "two sides", and another major reason was pro-tariff Andrew Jackson Democrats.
Rather there were always multiple allied or conflicting interests.
FLT-bird: "No, it was not that slavery was doomed.
They surely had to see it was doomed in every place that industrialized anyway as Britain and France had. "
And you can easily prove or disprove your own claims here simply by finding examples of Southern Democrat Fire Eaters who publicly admitted Southern slavery was doomed and therefore should be gradually, peacefully & lawfully abolished.
When should we expect to see such quotes from you?
FLT-bird: "What was doomed if they did not keep pace with seats in the Senate was their ability to protect themselves from even more rapacious trade and tax policies being pushed through by Northern special interests."
That is pure bovine excrement, and you well know it!
The real truth of the tariff issue is that many Southerners, from Madison & Monroe to Clay, Jackson and even (for a time) Calhoun supported protective tariffs, in the latter cases even the so-called "1828 Tariff of Abominations".
In 1846 most Southerners were happy to support the new Walker tariff rates which were then further reduced in 1857.
In 1860 Republicans proposed to increase protective tariffs back, essentially, to their 1846 rates, and that Morrill tariff proposal was defeated by Democrats in 1860, and not mentioned by any of the earliest "Reasons for Secession" documents.
So alleged "rapacious trade and tax policies" was purely a Lost Cause lie, concocted after the fact attempting to explain the otherwise inexplicable and justify the unjustifiable.
FLT-bird: "No question there was a power struggle between the two sides.
Trying to portray the North/Republicans of that time as lily white/pure of heart etc is a complete joke.
They were as greedy as any people in history.
They had been sucking money out of the South for generations and were trying to pass federal legislation that would allow them to dip their paws even deeper into Southern wallets."
And those are yet more of the essential Lost Cause Big Lies.
The real truth is: all of that alleged greed & corruption came from slaveholders' Northern Democrat allies, not Republicans, which never existed before ~1856 and whose Whig predecessors were just as often Northern Doughfaces as not.
The Lost Cause Big Lie is always to conflate Republicans with Northern Big City Doughfaced Democrats.
They were not the same people.
FLT-bird: "Their [Republicans'] interests were in jobs in industry and public works projects (paid for mostly by taxes paid by Southerners).
People have always been willing to vote themselves other people's money."
So several facts need to be pointed out here:
- Unlike today, when governments at all levels spend upwards of 30% of US GDP, in 1860 that number was about 2%, meaning something like 98% of US economic activity & jobs (especially Republicans') were unrelated to government spending.
- Then as now the vast majority of Republican voters lived on farms, in small & medium sized towns or suburbs, held jobs in agriculture, small business, manufacturing, professions & other such "middle class" occupations.
Then as now Republicans were usually the minority opposition party. - Then as now Democrats were an alliance of Big Business (slaveholders), globalist financial interests (of King Cotton) and Big City immigrant bosses (i.e., NY's Tammany Hall).
And Southern Democrats effectively ruled over Washington, DC, almost continuously from the election of 1800 until secession in 1861. - Lost Causer gross exaggerations notwithstanding, the "Southern economy" represented roughly 15% of the US total GDP of $4.4 billion in 1860.
In 1861 that Southern economy was deleted from the US totals and the result was roughly 15% loss of Federal tariff revenues. - So all claims that Southerners somehow paid the majority of Federal taxes are pure 100% bovine excrement.
Even claims that "Southern exports" somehow "paid for" ~75% of US imports (and so tariffs) are pure nonsense, since the main thing "Southern exports" paid for was "imports" of manufactured goods from the North -- i.e., woolen & cotton clothing, shoes, hats, iron products (i.e., stoves, farm implements, railroad iron, nails, etc.), paper, soap & candles.
There may also have been Midwestern food & livestock that were not captured in these statistics. - Finally, studies of Federal spending before 1860 show that it was roughly equally distributed North vs. South unless by "the North" you mean every state North of South Carolina!
Again, it's all just more Democrat bovine excrement intended to bedazzle & obscure the real facts.