Sheet music:Underground Railroad March

In 1831 Mary Graves of Fayette City, Kentucky, sold "a certain mulatto woman named Maria" and her two children, Bruce and Henrietta, "slaves for life," to William C. Carr of St. Louis, Missouri, for the sum of $535. Concluded decades before the devastating Civil War, this sale illustrates the contentious issues that later divided the nation. Westward expansion took off in the early years of the 19th century, and southern slaveholders moving West in search of more fertile ground took the scourge of slavery with them. While the nation had prohibited participation in the international slave trade in 1808, domestic trading contributed substantially to the profitability and expansion of slavery. In 1819 a contentious political battle erupted in Congress over the future of slavery when the recently settled State of Missouri applied for statehood: though located in the North, Missouri's population comprised mainly southern slaveholders. Congress remained bitterly divided about whether Missouri should be admitted as a slave or free state, but a compromise the following year allowed Maine to enter as a free state and Missouri as a slave state, thus preserving harmony in the Union. That harmony lasted only 40 more years.