This is a much more complicated question that it might seem at first blush, but that's what we're here for. :)

The short answer is that every sectional clash (that is, fight over slavery's role and place in the nation) ratchets up the level of mutual distrust and progressively radicalizes both sections. For the South, that means more political actors become committed to wild proslavery constitutional theories and see disunion as a viable remedy. For the North, it means more political actors become convinced that action of some kind has to be taken to prevent their local free labor system from being supplanted by slavery. Each time one section inches out a bit, the other inches out a bit further. That prompts the natural reaction, which prompts the next reaction until the cannons open up on Fort Sumter.

That sort of works as a first approximation and it's essentially the narrative most Americans probably get in a survey course. The era of sectional tension begins during the Mexican War and climaxes on the first cannonball halfway across the water from the batteries on shore to Fort Sumter. It's a neat story that captures the broad trend, but misses many important nuances.

It is broadly true that the proslavery and antislavery movements are mutually antagonistic and feed on each other, but the straight tit-for-tat version of that misses the wild asymmetry between them. With few exceptions (radical abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison, in the main) antislavery Americans are interested in working within the system and don't want to make a direct challenge to slavery where it already exists. Insofar as they are willing to make those inroads at all, they are always contingent on a general agreement with the slave states on mutual ends. Many of them probably think that the Union itself will slowly erode slavery, but they're content to let it do the work for them.

The proslavery side began its career by making absolute demands on the less-enslaved states at the Constitutional Convention. There's some debate about how sincere the threats to quit the national project were, but as a practical matter everywhere south of the Potomac and east of the Appalachians expects slavery to continue for the foreseeable future, likely in perpetuity. You do have a wave of manumissions in the Upper South during the Revolutionary era, but vastly more enslavers keep their human property and are prepared to defend it against all hazards. This is also true of enslavers in the future free states. There's just fewer enslavers and thus less political influence for them north of the Mason-Dixon. The imperative to do something about slavery is nowhere near that strong.

We come out of Philadelphia with the first "compromises". They are compromises in the sense that the slave states don't get every conceivable thing they could possibly want, with a herd of ponies and rainbows as a bonus. For example, they wanted their human property to count 5/5 for representation. This would give slavery extra power in the national government, since slaves are by definition not citizens or otherwise meaningfully part of the moral community. They might as well have asked to have votes for their cows and chickens, a point that northerners did not shy away from pointing out. But no slave state organized their own governments that way. They wanted a specific extra power over the less-enslaved states as a hedge against threats to slavery.

They got 3/5 of that. You can say the missing 2/5 is a compromise, but that presumes that giving slavery extra power in the Congress above and beyond that enjoyed by freedom is the natural state of things. Even 1/5, or 1/100 would have been a material advantage, albeit less of one. The Constitutional Convention did not demand any special consideration in exchange for the extra power. One is tacked on substantially later, but it's a weak tax liability and not given as a quid pro quo. The less enslaved states just plain caved.

This is also true of the fugitive slave clause, which granted slavery an extraterritoriality which it previously lacked. Before the Constitution, if a slave could get across into another state there was no general right for the enslaver to go out and get them back. Likewise the absolute prohibition on ending the import of slaves from abroad until 1808, which the South was even able to get pushed back from 1800. We know that the trade was ended on 1/1/1808, but what was agreed to was protection for it at least until that date. By the time it had come and gone, people at the time believed the Lower South would have imported quite enough people to ensure slavery in perpetuity there. They were right and even when the time came, the huge majority for the ban only obscures the fact that the South fought hard to make the ban as ineffective as they could.

Moving up to the Missouri crisis of 1820, we have another capitulation. The issue was whether or not Missouri, which had about 10k slaves at the time, could come into the Union as a state without adopting a gradual emancipation plan which would in time make it into a free state. Missouri got to keep its slavery and even its laws against free blacks. In exchange the free states got a mostly meaningless concession that future land north of Missouri's southern border would have no slavery...at least until statehood. When the time came to organize territories and then states out of that land, the South could always employ its effective veto power in the Senate to ensure that the slavery prohibition went away. They did just that in 1854 with the Kansas-Nebraska Act. This was the antislavery movement losing on everything, though they later decided to recast it as an important precedent that the Congress could ban slavery.

Essentially the same thing happens over the spoils of the Mexican War. The free states must suffer the massively intrusive new fugitive slave law, the introduction of slavery (in potential and then in fact) to New Mexico and Utah where it was previously illegal, and in exchange gets almost nothing. A free California, which Congress lacked the practical power and inclination to force to adopt slavery against the expressed will of its white residents, and a ban on the public slave trade in the District of Columbia. The last means you wouldn't have auctions down the street from the Capitol, but you'd still have them just across the river in Alexandria or over the line in Maryland plus any private sales enslavers might choose. It's not an absolute defeat for antislavery, but it's a pretty serious one. So goes the Compromise of 1850.

The basic pattern is that the South gets the great majority of what it wants and the free states get largely ineffective concessions. Furthermore, the capitulations have become increasingly imperial. The fugitive slave act is a great example here, as it criminalizes helping fugitives and sets up a makeshift draft for every able-bodied Yankee to join the slave catchers. Then the Kansas-Nebraska Act writes free territories out of the future of the United States. Cue proslavery militants seizing Kansas by force. The two events inspire the formation of the Republican Party and make its cause (no new slave territories) credible for a large part of the white North.

That leaves the North with a dominant political party committed to placing some limits on slavery, which wins the House (in coalition with others) in 1854. They lose that in '56, but almost win the presidency. Come '60, they do win the White House. But all of that's at the end of decades of loss and capitulation, to the point where it's clear that the future existence of free states in any meaningful sense as in doubt. By contrast, the South got its own political movement in the 1790s committed (among other things, but vitally) to the preservation of slavery against all real threats and many more remote ones. It took the free states the entire history of the United States to 1860 to catch up to that point with respect to free labor.

This is broadly how slavery caused the Civil War, particularly by way of those capitulations, but the road doesn't become all that straight even by historical standards until the Mexican War. That's why the traditional periodization begins there, but I do think it underrates the seriousness (if not the success) of prior antislavery. Southern reactions were always out of proportion to the actual threat and helped drive less committed white northerners over the line, but slavery is fundamentally insecure as the enslaved don't want to be enslaved. The kind of often grotesque discipline required to keep them in line and profit-generating shaped southern politics in such a way that tensions with emerging free labor polities would have been hard to avoid even without them. It's not for nothing that northerners complain that southerners treat them like they do slaves. It's not literally true, but slavery embodies and requires a kind of theory of power which can't brook many challenges if it's going to survive and the presence of free jurisdictions within the same Union is inevitably going to present a kind of challenge unless the slave power is put decisively on top and given considerable extra privileges over the others. Which is just how things worked out in the antebellum US largely without interruption until 1860.