Multiple Votes for Speaker was not Uncommon before the Civil War...

[5fish]

Yes, there were a few times before the Civil War it took multiple votes to pick a Speaker of the House... list at the link...

Speaker Elections Decided by Multiple Ballots | US House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives

The House has elected a Speaker 128 times since 1789. The Speaker is elected at the beginning of the new Congress by a majority of the Representatives-elect from a selection of candidates nominated on the floor prior to the vote. Usually, those candidates are chosen separately by the majority-...

history.house.gov

There have been 14 instances of Speaker elections requiring multiple ballots (the records for the 2nd Congress, 1791–1793, are inconclusive, and the House has filled vacancies in the Speakership three times using a resolution). Thirteen of 14 multiple-ballot elections occurred before the Civil War, when party divisions were more nebulous. The last time a Speaker election required two or more votes on the floor happened in 1923

 

[5fish]

Howell Cobb... Civil War general for the south was the Speaker of the House ... He was at first a Unionist... was Speaker when the Compromise of 1850 passed...

Speaker of the House Howell Cobb of Georgia | US House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives

On this date, former Speaker of the House Howell Cobb of Georgia died of a heart attack in New York City. Born on September 7, 1815, at his family’s “Cherry Hill” plantation in Jefferson County, Georgia, Cobb trained in the law and started in politics in 1836 as a pledged vote from Georgia for...

history.house.gov

Cobb broke with other Southern Members who sought to combine their state delegations into a sectional voting bloc in order to protect the system of slavery. In 1849, his pro-Union stance thrust him into the Speakership on the 63rd ballot as a compromise candidate, paving the way for him to oversee the passage of the Compromise of 1850. After serving a single term as Speaker, Cobb was elected governor of Georgia on the Unionist ticket.

 

[5fish]

Nathaniel Banks... A Civil War general for the union... He was a Speaker of the House before the war...

BANKS, Nathaniel Prentice | US House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives

BANKS, Nathaniel Prentice, a Representative from Massachusetts; born in Waltham, Mass., January 30, 1816; attended the common schools; a machinist by trade; editor of a weekly paper in Waltham, Mass.; clerk in the customhouse in Boston, Mass.; studied law; was admitted to the Suffolk County bar...

history.house.gov

member of the State house of representatives 1849-1852, for two years serving as speaker; member of the State constitutional convention of 1853; elected as a Democrat to the Thirty-third Congress, as the candidate of the American Party to the Thirty-fourth Congress, and as a Republican to the Thirty-fifth Congress and served from March 4, 1853, until he resigned December 24, 1857, to become Governor; Speaker of the House of Representatives (Thirty-fourth Congress); Governor of Massachusetts from January 1858, until January 1861;

Here is another take... first national Republican party victory?

Nathaniel Prentiss Banks (1816-1894)

www.thelatinlibrary.com

At the opening of the 34th Congress, the anti-Nebraska men gradually united in supporting Banks for speaker, and after one of the bitterest and most protracted speakership contests in the history of congress, lasting from December 3, 1855 to February 2, 1856, he was chosen on the 133rd ballot. This has been called the first national victory of the Republican party.

Re-elected in 1856 as a Republican, he resigned his seat in December 1857, and was governor of Massachusetts from 1858 to 1861, a period marked by notable administrative and educational reforms. He then succeeded George B. McClellan as president of the Illinois Central railway. When McClellan entered upon his Peninsular Campaign in 1862 the important duty of defending Washington from the army of "Stonewall" Jackson fell to the corps commanded by Banks.

 

[5fish]

I found what happen 100 when it took 9 ballots to elect a Speaker of the House in 1923... He was the Speaker but in 1923 he had opposition...

The last time a House Speaker's vote went to multiple ballots? It was 100 years ago for Mass. Republican - Massachusetts News

With all eyes in Washington, DC on Republican Congressman Kevin McCarthy while he was at work feverishly on Tuesday to garner enough votes for his election as

localtoday.news

The last time a multiple-ballot speaker vote occurred was in 1923, when a bloc of Republicans refused to re-elect Rep. Frederick Huntington Gillett, a patrician Republican from Massachusetts, as a hammer-banger, according to the U.S. House of Representatives archives.

During the Battle of the Rockspeakers in 1923, a group of Progressive Republicans forced Gillett to endure nine votes for speaker before he was declared the winner, Garrison Nelson, professor emeritus of law, politics and political behavior at the University of Vermont, wrote in a 2018 opinion piece published in The Globe.

Gillett was a longtime congressman, ally of President Calvin Coolidge and vying for his third term as speaker in 1923 when he hit some resistance from Progressives, according to historians.