perfectly obvious that with the appended section, the Nebraska bill
differed essentially from its prototypes, though Douglas contended
that he had only made explicit what was contained implicitly in the
Utah bill.

Two years later Douglas replied to certain criticisms from Trumbull in
these words: "He knew, or, if not, he ought to know, that the bill in
the shape in which it was first reported, as effectually repealed the
Missouri restriction as it afterwards did when the repeal was put in
express terms. The only question was whether it should be done in the
language of the acts of 1850, or in the language subsequently
employed, but the legal effect was precisely the same."[448] Of course
Douglas was here referring to the original bill containing the
twenty-first section.

It has commonly been assumed that Douglas desired the repeal of the
Missouri Compromise in order to open Nebraska to slavery. This was the
passionate accusation of his anti-slavery contemporaries; and it has
become the verdict of most historians. Yet there is ample evidence
that Douglas had no such wish and intent. He had said in 1850, and on
other occasions, that he believed the prairies to be dedicated to
freedom by a law above human power to repeal. Climate, topography, the
conditions of slave labor, which no Northern man knew better, forbade
slavery in the unoccupied areas of the West.[449] True, he had no such
horror of slavery extension as many Northern men manifested; he was
probably not averse to sacrificing some of the region dedicated by law
to freedom, if thereby he could carry out his cherished project of
developing the greater Northwest; but that he deliberately planned to
plant slavery in all that region, is contradicted by the
incontrovertible fact that he believed the area of slavery to be