In pursuance of the policy of trying to balance, politically, freedom and slavery, and to deal tenderly with the latter, and not offend its champions, new States were admitted into the Union in pairs, one free and one slave. Thus Vermont and Kentucky, Tennessee and Ohio, Louisiana and Indiana, Mississippi and Illinois were coupled, preserving in the Senate an exact balance of power.(40) When Missouri had framed a Constitution (1819) and applied for admission into the Union, Alabama was on the point of admission as a slave State, and was admitted the same year, and thus the usage required the admission of Missouri as a free State. In 1790 the two sections were nearly equal in population, but in 1820 the North had nearly 700,000 more inhabitants than the South. Missouri was a part of the Louisiana Purchase, and she had in 1820 above 10,000 slaves. The usual form of a bill was prepared admitting her, with slavery, on an equal footing with other States. It came up for consideration in the House during the session of 1818-1819, and Mr. Tallmadge, of New York, precipitated a controversy, which was participated in by all the great statesmen, North and South, who were then on the political stage. He offered to amend the bill so as to prohibit the further introduction of slaves into Missouri, and providing that all children born in the State after its admission should be free at twenty-five years of age. This amendment was a signal for the fiercest opposition. Clay and Webster, Wm. Pinckney of Maryland, and Rufus King of New York, John Randolph of Roanoke, Fisher Ames, and others, who were in the early prime of their manhood, were heard in the fray. In it the first real threats of disunion, if slavery were interfered with, were heard. It is more than possible those threats pierced the ears of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, who still survived,(41) and caused them to despair of the Republic. It is worthy of note that none of the great statesmen engaged in this first memorable combat in which the Union was threatened in slavery's cause, lived to confront disunion in fact, face to face.