How were the north and south different aside from slavery?

They can be compared to the two sides in the English Civil War two hundred years earlier, from which many of the families were directly descended.

At the end of that war, when the King was executed, a lot of defeated Royalists (Cavaliers) thought it was going to get too hot for them, and they emigrated to America, where they gravitated South to the plantations.

Ten years later, with the restoration of Charles II, a lot of Parliamentarians (Roundheads) thought it was going to get hard for them and they moved to America, where they gravitated North to New York, and carried on the Puritan agenda.

And those were the two different kinds of people who faced each other in America in 1861.