While Monroe was President, Congress had a difficult situation to face. Missouri applied for admission to the Union in 1819. Since there were eleven free and eleven slave states in the Union at this time, there was equal representation in the Senate from the North and from the South. However, the North had increased much more rapidly in population than had the South with the result that there were 105 Northern representatives in the House of Representatives and only 81 Southern representatives in the same body. Therefore, the South did not want any additional free states admitted to the Union at this time to upset the equal balance in the Senate. Consequently, a bill which had been proposed to admit Missouri to the Union with the understanding that slavery was to be abolished there directly upon such admission failed to pass in the Senate. In the same year, Maine, a free state, applied for statehood. Slavery had become a significant sectional issue by 1819 and Henry Clay, a native of Hanover County, proposed the now-famous Missouri Compromise of 1820: Maine was to be admitted as a free state, Misouri as a slave state; slavery was to be forever excluded in the rest of the Louisiana Purchase Territory north of the parallel of 36´ 30´´ (southern boundary of Missouri). Although Henry Clay, later known as the "Great Pacificator" or "Peacemaker" because of his ability to make compromises in difficult situations, moved to Kentucky in his "twenties," he studied law with the famous Virginia lawyer, George Wythe, and acquired many of his political beliefs in Virginia. President Monroe signed the Missouri Compromise expressing his approval of this bill. A new trend in foreign policy was formulated by President Monroe, with the help of his Secretary of State, John Quincy Adams, in his annual message to Congress on December 2, 1823. The Monroe Doctrine, as it was later termed, stated that there was to be no further European colonization in the Western Hemisphere, that no European nation was to interfere in the government of any nation in the Western Hemisphere and that violation of either of the previous principles would be considered unfriendly to the government of the United States. In return, the government of the United States would not interfere in the governments of Europe.