By 1819, a heated controversy over whether or not Missouri was to be admitted to the Union as a slave state or as a free state was underway. Before Missouri's admission to the Union, there was an equal balance of free state and slave state senators in the United Sates Senate. If Missouri was to be admitted as a slave state without the admission of another free state, it would have upset the balance in the Senate.
             Not too long after the conflict over Missouri had begun, Maine had applied for statehood as well. Eventually, the United States Congress managed to come up with a solution to the slavery conflicts, called the Missouri Compromise. The Missouri compromise basically allowed for Maine to be admitted as a free state and Missouri as a slave state, but it also said that all new states formed in the Union north of the southern border of Missouri in the area of the Louisiana Purchase were to be free. Although some may have thought that the conflict over slavery was over in the United States, the Missouri Compromise merely postponed America's problems.
             The admission of Missouri to the Union caused one of America's most famous and heated political conflicts. "Never before or since did such a request for statehood create such an outcry, so that in arguing over Missouri many Americans actually saw the specter of disunion" (Nagel 44). To solve the debate over slavery in Missouri, three sessions of Congress presided before the Missouri Compromise was reached in 1820.
             In order to fully understand the reason for the creation of the Missouri Compromise, one must first fully examine the conditions of the South at the time. John C. Calhoun once said:
             It would be well for those interested to reflect whether there now exists, or ever has existed, a wealthy and civilized community in which one portion did not live on the labor of another; and whether the form in which slavery exists in the South is not
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