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As said in the title, why was there a need to maintain the balance of power between the Slave states and Free States by keeping them equal in number, before the American Civil War?
Both the Clay Compromise and the Missouri Comprise were aimed at achieving this.
It may, perhaps, be a silly question, but I cannot make out any intuitive answer myself, neither does my textbook provide any insight.
Fundamentally, it's the same reasons why all balances of power have ever been maintained: because people wanted to keep the status quo. The root of the issue was of course slavery. Both the North and the South feared the other side, and by extension slavery and abolitionism, gaining control of the federal government.
The struggle was focused in the Senate because the South had a much smaller population, especially of whites. Even with the Three-Fifths Compromise, the southern states were a distinct minority in the House of Representatives. Constitutionally, therefore, the South's ability to preserve their "peculiar institution" of slavery rested with their control in the Senate. Because every state was entitled to two senators regardless of size or population, the upper chamber allowed the less populous South approximately equal power to the North.
It was thus "necessary" to preserve the balance of power in the Senate because otherwise, the slave states feared, they would be unable to prevent Northern, free, states from meddling with Southern slavery. Conversely, the Free states feared slave power, which in addition to immorality, they perceived to be a threat to Republicanism itself. Because membership in the Senate is state based, the admission of new states into the Union posed a potential threat to this balance.
Hence why both the Missouri Compromise and the Compromise of 1850 aimed to preserve a balance of free and slave states in the Senate, typically by arranging for paired admissions of free and slave states.
Why was it necessary to maintain a balance of power between the Slave and Free states?
Because without a balance of Senate seats Congress could vote to make slavery illegal, which they ultimately did while the Civil war was ongoing and all the Southern Senators were absent. The Missouri Compromise kept the balance in tact for decades. When it was renegotiated with the Kansas Nebraska Act days of the South's parity in the Senate were tenuous. Rather than a formula which guaranteed the South's parity as the Missouri Compromised entailed, the Kansas Nebraska act allowed new territories to decide themselves if they would be free or slave. When Kansas voted to come into the union as a free state in 1861 the parity was gone and the Civil War was on.
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