<P> The Missouri Compromise is the title generally attached to the legislation passed by the 16th United States Congress on May 8, 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 April 6, 1820 . </P> <P> Earlier, on February 3, 1819, 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 . </P> <P> When free - soil Maine offered its petition for statehood, the Senate quickly linked the Maine and Missouri bills, making Maine admission a condition for Missouri entering the Union with slavery unrestricted . Senator Jesse B. Thomas of Illinois added a compromise proviso, excluding slavery from all remaining lands of the Louisiana Purchase north of the 36 ° 30' parallel . The combined measures passed the Senate, only to be voted down in the House by those Northern representatives who held out for a free Missouri . Speaker of the House Henry Clay of Kentucky, in a desperate bid to break the deadlock, divided the Senate bills . Clay and his pro-compromise allies succeeded in pressuring half the anti-restrictionist House Southerners to submit to the passage of the Thomas proviso, while maneuvering a number of restrictionist House northerners to acquiesce in supporting Missouri as a slave state . The Missouri question in the 15th Congress ended in stalemate on March 4, 1819, the House sustaining its northern antislavery position, and the Senate blocking a slavery restricted statehood . </P> <P> The Missouri Compromise was controversial at the time, as many worried over the country being now lawfully divided along sectional lines . The bill was effectively repealed in the Kansas--Nebraska Act, and declared unconstitutional in Dred Scott v. Sandford . This increased tensions over slavery and eventually led to the Civil War . </P>

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