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Did anybody see the Civil War coming? The answer there that it depends what one means by "see the Civil War coming" and also what "the Civil War entails" in their minds when they do or don't see it. So let's open the box on Schroedinger's Antebellum American for the firm yes and firm no that are both correct.

Predictions of a civil war are almost as old as the Republic, regularly raised as the obvious result of an attempt at breaking the Union. These largely take the role of a general fear and warning, rather than a specific thing people expect to happen in the immediate future. So in the most permissive sense we can say that many people saw it coming, but that papers over a lot of important nuance. A theoretical civil war is, most of the time for most Americans, not a major concern. When tensions over slavery rise -and it's always slavery that brings things to this point- there's a sense that Something Must Be Done or the whole nation may explode. That Something is basically to give slavery extra protections and advantages beyond its already extraordinary protection granted by the Constitution, guarantees which considerably exceed any later provided for freedom or equality. There's usually also a fig leaf for free state pols so they can say they didn't totally betray their constituents (at least the ones who dislike slavery) but those concessions are insbustantial and never remotely commensurate with what the enslavers got.

Until the late 1840s, the steady give (to enslavers) and take (from the enslaved) is the general outline of American politics without major exception. The conflict over the spoils of the Mexican War marked an important departure from that norm and things never quite get back to the status quo ante. There's always been conflict over slavery's future in the nation, but coming into the 1850s the usual rounds of heavy capitulation to the enslavers don't do the trick anymore. Partly, it's that they've gotten so extreme that ordinary whites across the North now feel personally implicated in slavery in ways they were not before courtesy of the Fugitive Slave Act but there's also a general trend of lesser known proslavery provocations that slowly added weight to the antislavery case in the decades prior. The two trends feed on each other in important ways, but most white Americans outside the general evangelical reformist movement of the era don't consider themselves primarily antislavery in their politics until the last antebellum decade even if they do oppose the institution. The big reactions to the Compromise of 1850, followed up by the realization that it really settled nothing, a series of daring rescues of fugitive slaves from their would-be captors, and similar genuinely popular resistance to slavery kick off the decade.

The tension only ratchets up from there, with a new provocation in the form of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. The law opens vast new territories to slavery, where American law had previously forbade its entry for thirty years. That whether or not slavery will go into Kansas will be settled on the ground leads to a fair bit of actually fighting it out during small-scale violence that erupts for a while into a little war within the territory. Seeing this as their chance to put right what went wrong with the Kansas-Nebraska Act, antislavery Northerners are eager to fund settlement by their own people in the territory. Proslavery Missourians view this as stealing "their" turf and respond with semisecret paramilitaries, massive vote fraud, and a fair bit of violence around polling places. All of this keeps the issue in the news and at the center of American politics past the middle of the decade.

This is all way too much for the systems built up in the 1820s and 1830s to muzzle antislavery whites and defend slavery to handle. The biggest of those are two national parties, with enough constituency and power in each section to act as effective pressure on antislavery members in their own ranks to keep in line and to a lesser degree to force other issues which divide antislavery men between the two parties. As long as antislavery whites are divided between Whigs (mostly) and Democrats (an important minority) and other issues on which they disagree (the tariff, internal improvements, the national bank) remain the focus of politics, all this can keep puttering along. When slavery takes center stage and becomes the issue, then who cares about the bank, some roads, or a duty on whatever? In that environment, being antislavery counts more and the party coalitions fracture.

That happens in every sectional clash, which is why more conservative types understand them as so threatening. What happens in 1852-5 is a lot worse than usual because the dispute over the Mexican Cession went on for literal years and the solution kept the issue alive. That solution was a Whig program, roughly, originally managed by the party's chief founder Henry Clay. Clay's solution did not get through Congress with mainly Whig votes because the party's antislavery wing would not accept it and their proslavery wing was lukewarm at best. Instead it's managed by Stephen Douglas, the Democracy's rising star. In the South, that means that the Democrats can deliver for slavery and the Whigs cannot. Until this point, Whiggery has been the South's second party and genuinely competitive in some states. The fallout from 1850 is a lot of Whigs staying home and Whig pols being pounded at the polls. At the same time, Southern Democrats are adopting a still more radically proslavery line...and they were already incredibly proslavery. Lower South Whiggery collapses.

What's that do to the Whig Party? It had a bit of a northern tilt to begin with. It's just lost a lot of its voices in the Lower South which tend to be more compromise-minded toward the North as well as an important counterweight on the strong antislavery wing up in the North. The result is a party that's somewhat more antislavery (although still not primarily so) which makes the problem for Southern Whigs worse still. But there are enough conservative, proslavery Whigs in the North to maybe even some of that out. The thing is, they're all tainted by the fact that they voted for hated elements of the Compromise of 1850, particularly the Fugitive Slave Act and their leaders insist that that most odious law must be zealously enforced.

Maybe the Whigs could have recovered from that had the Kansas Question not opened when it did, but that kicks up in 1853 (a little) and then goes huge in 1854. With those conservative Whigs still around making the party look bad, actual antislavery Whigs have a sense that the party is not going to ever come around their way and that it may not be a longterm viable vehicle for them. The fallout from this is that the Whigs contest the presidential election in 1852, lose, and never do another. By the time 1856 rolls around, antislavery Whigs have gotten together with antislavery Dems (who are getting out of their own party for its more radical proslavery turn) to form the Republicans. Because it's a heterogeneous group of people united only on opposing slavery, the GOP is fundamentally an antislavery party first and everything else question mark. That makes it by default a Northern party, though there are some important players from the least enslaved slave states among the lot.

We can flip the script and do the same for the South, where the Democrats are now absolutely the Southern party and the question is how Southern they will be. Their dispute, internally, is over how far to go with slavery in the territories just as the GOP's uniting issue is that slavery will go no farther. These divisions harden steadily over the 1850s, particularly in the decade's back half when the Dems have two important crack-ups of their own. The first of these is over whether to accept the obviously fraudulent proslavery government of Kansas as a state (remember the proslavery guys cheated massively) or instead take on the antislavery Kansas government which is technically illegal and possibly treasonous but actually has the solid support of a majority of white Kansans. This is the point where the big names lay into each other, with James Buchanan on one side going his all for slavery as he has done for an entire long and miserable career and Stephen Douglas (him again) insisting that none of what shook out in Kansas was what he intended when he started the whole mess, the antislavery guys started it, but in the end you gotta give it to their government.