The repeal of the Missouri Compromise re striction was hotly denounced by the anti slavery element and was seized with alacrity and used with great effect as a political weapon by anti-slavery agitators and politicians; and Douglas was also savagely denounced for selfish subserviency to the South for the sake of win ning the Presidency. But Douglas and his friends ably and plausibly defended the repeal of the Missouri restriction on the ground that it was consistent with and the natural sequence of the popular sovereignty compromise of 1850; that there was danger that it would be held unconstitutional by the courts; that there was ground for fear that Dixon's amendment, as he proposed it, would legislate slavery into the Territories, and that on the whole Douglas, as leader of the dominant party, and having regard to the preservation of the Union as well as to the vexatious slavery question, made the safest and best terms practicable in securing the right of the people to decide the question of slavery for themselves. In the course of the debate on the bill Douglas, as well as Thomas H. Benton, who was opposed to the repeal of the Missouri restriction, insisted that, left to the people, slavery could never be successfully introduced into Kansas or Nebraska.
Impartial consideration of all the facts bear ing upon this phase of the question leaves no ground for the charge preferred by leading his torians and others that the proposed Nebraska Territory was at last divided into Kansas and Nebraska at the instance of Southern members to gain opportunity to make Kansas a slave State. The °provisional° delegate in Congress at that time from Nebraska well known by contemporary citizens of the Territory as a reliable man, in his published account of his part in the transaction asserts that, before he went to Washington to attend the session of December 1853, it was agreed among the enter prising citizens of western Iowa — there were then no citizens of Nebraska — who were push ing the project for Territorial organization, that division was desirable so that one of the Terri tories might be directly opposite their State, and that he urged this change upon Douglas, who assented to it. In the debate on this feature of the bill Senator Dodge of anti slavery Iowa and Representative Henn of the Iowa district bordering on Nebraska urged the division for the frankly expressed reasons that it would be to their advantage to have the capi tal of an important commonwealth opposite them and would aid in securing the route of the Pacific Railroad through their part of the country; while the representatives of slave holding Missouri were indifferent to the ques tion of division. Douglas himself specified the
wish of the Iowa members as the basis of his reason for the division of the Territory. It is significant, moreover, that Douglas had al ways stood for a northern Territory, as shown by his original bills of 1844 and 1848. It is a very significant fact that the northern boundary of the Territory in each of these bills was the 43d parallel, which is identical with the northern boundary of the present State; and that the southern boundary described in the bill of 1848 was also identical with the same boundary of the State, while the southern boundary described in the bill of 1844 was only two degrees farther south. These and other incidents of a like kind show a remarkable prescience and a persistent consistency in interpreting the wishes and in terests of those most directly interested in the Territory opposite the State of Iowa and on the line of the great natural highway connect ing Chicago, the commercial mart of the North west, and the home of Douglas, with the Pacific Coast. Mr. Henn in resenting "the unjust charge made on this floor by several that it (the proposed division) was the scheme of Southern men whereby one of the States to be forMed out of these Territories was to be a slave State,'" put the case concisely: "The bill is of more practical importance to the State of Iowa and the people I represent than to any other State or constituency in the Union."' The Kansas-Nebraska Bill was also distin guished by more completely safeguarding the rights of Indian occupants than any previous Territorial organic acts had done; and likewise in being the first Territorial bill of that class which provided for the choice of the members of both houses of the legislature by popular election, to drop the provision requiring the submission of all acts of the legislative assem bly to Congress for approval. The Territory organized by this bill comprised all of the unorganized part of the Louisiana Purchase north of the 37th parallel, which comprised all of the purchase north of that line except the States of Iowa and Missouri, and that part of the Territory of Minnesota between the Missis sippi River on the east and the Missouri and White Earth rivers on the south and west.