Missouri Compromise was a plan agreed upon by the United States Congress in 1820 to settle the debate over slavery in the Louisiana Purchase area. The plan temporarily maintained the balance between free and slave states. ... Slavery was legal in the Territory of Missouri, and about 10,000 slaves lived there.
At the end of the French and Indian War or the Seven Years War, the British lost most of their land west of the Appalachians and there was no place for new colonists to go.
