<Tr> <Td> <Ul> <Li> </Li> <Li> </Li> <Li> </Li> </Ul> </Td> </Tr> <Ul> <Li> </Li> <Li> </Li> <Li> </Li> </Ul> <P> The Missouri Compromise is the title generally attached to the legislation passed by the 16th United States Congress on May 9, 1820 . The measures provided for the admission of Maine as a free state along with Missouri as a slave state, thus maintaining the balance of power between North and South . As part of the compromise, slavery was prohibited north of the 36 ° 30 ′ parallel, excluding Missouri . President James Monroe signed the legislation on March 6, 1820 . </P> <P> Earlier, on February 4, 1820, Representative James Tallmadge Jr., a Jeffersonian Republican from New York, submitted two amendments to Missouri's request for statehood, which included restrictions on slavery . Southerners objected to any bill which imposed federal restrictions on slavery, believing that slavery was a state issue settled by the Constitution . However, with the Senate evenly split at the opening of the debates, both sections possessing 11 states, the admission of Missouri would give the South an advantage . Northern critics including Federalists and Democratic - Republicans objected to the expansion of slavery into the Louisiana Purchase territory on the Constitutional inequalities of the three - fifths rule, which conferred Southern representation in the federal government, derived from a states' slave population . Jeffersonian Republicans in the North ardently maintained that a strict interpretation of the Constitution required that Congress act to limit the spread of slavery on egalitarian grounds . "(Northern) Republicans rooted their antislavery arguments, not on expediency, but in egalitarian morality"; and "The Constitution, (said northern Jeffersonians) strictly interpreted, gave the sons of the founding generation the legal tools to hasten (the) removal (of slavery), including the refusal to admit additional slave states ." </P>

What was a result of the missouri compromise