The Missouri Compromise was intended to clearly separate slave and free states while ensuring balance between the two types of states. It helped keep the United States together for more than three decades. Find out more in Slavery and the Missouri Compromise, a title in the Building Our Nation series.Building Our Nation is a series of AV2 media enhanced books. A unique book code printed on page 2 unlocks multimedia content. These books come alive with video, audio, weblinks, slideshows, activities, hands-on experiments, and much more.