The regrettable aspect of Douglas’s course is his attempt to nullify the Missouri Compromise by subtle indirection.  This was the device of a shifty politician, trying to avert suspicion and public alarm by clever ambiguities.  That he really believed a new principle had been substituted for an old one, in dealing with the Territories, does not extenuate the offense, for not even he had ventured to assert in 1850, that the compromises of that year had in any wise disturbed the status of the great, unorganized area to which Congress had applied the restrictive proviso of 1820.  Besides, only so recently as 1849, he had said, with all the emphasis of sincerity, that the compromise had “become canonized in the hearts of the American people, as a sacred thing, which no ruthless hand would ever be reckless enough to disturb.”  And while he then opposed the extension of the principle to new Territories, he believed that it had been “deliberately incorporated into our legislation as a solemn and sacred compromise."[450]

By this time Douglas must have been aware of the covert purpose of Atchison and others to secure the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, though he hoped that they would acquiesce in his mode of doing it.  He was evidently not prepared for the bold move which certain of the senators from slave States were contemplating.[451] He was therefore startled by an amendment which Dixon of Kentucky offered on January 16th, to the effect that the restrictive clause of the Act of 1820 should not be so construed as to apply to Nebraska or any other Territory; “but that the citizens of the several States or territories shall be at liberty to take and hold their slaves within any of the territories of the United States or of the States to be formed therefrom,” as if the Missouri Act had never been passed.  Douglas at once left his seat to remonstrate with Dixon, who was on the Whig side of the Senate chamber.  He disliked the amendment, not so much because it wiped out the Missouri Compromise as because it seemed “affirmatively to legislate slavery into the Territory."[452] Knowing Dixon to be a supporter of the compromise measures of 1850, Douglas begged him not to thwart the work of his committee, which was trying in good faith to apply the cardinal features of those measures to Nebraska.  The latter part of Dixon’s amendment could hardly be harmonized with the principle of congressional non-intervention.[453]

There seems to be no reason to doubt that Dixon moved in this matter on his own initiative;[454] but he was a friend to Atchison and he could not have been wholly ignorant of the Missouri factional quarrel.[455] To be sure, Dixon was a Whig, but Southern Whigs and Democrats were at one in desiring expansion for the peculiar institution of their section.  Pressure was now brought to bear upon Douglas to incorporate the direct repeal of the compromise in the Nebraska bill.[456] He objected strongly, foreseeing no doubt the storm of protest which would burst over his head