This additional section transformed the whole bill.  For the first time the people of the Territory are mentioned as the determining agents in respect to slavery.  And the unavoidable inference followed, that they were not to be hampered in their choice by the restrictive feature of the Missouri Act of 1820.  The omission of this weighty section was certainly a most extraordinary oversight.  Whose was the “clerical error”?  Attached to the original draft, now in the custody of the Secretary of the Senate, is a sheet of blue paper, in Douglas’s handwriting, containing the crucial article.  All evidence points to the conclusion that Douglas added this hastily, after the bill had been twice read in the Senate and ordered to be printed; but whether it was carelessly omitted by the copyist or appended by Douglas as an afterthought, it is impossible to say.[447] After his report of January 4th, there was surely no reason why Douglas should have hesitated to incorporate the three propositions in the bill; but it is 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 “He knew, or, if not, he ought to know, that the bill in the shape in which it was first reported, as effectually repealed the Missouri restriction as it afterwards did when the repeal was put in express terms.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 circumscribed definitely by Nature.  Man might propose but physical geography would dispose.