On the 4th of January, 1854, Douglas reported from the Senate Committee on Territories a bill to organize the territory of Nebraska. It provided that said territory, or any portion of it, when admitted as a state or states, should be received into the Union with or without slavery, as their constitution might prescribe at the time of their admission. The Missouri Compromise Act of 1820, which applied to this territory, was not repealed by this provision, and it must have been plain to everybody that if slavery were excluded from the _territory_ it would not be there when the people should come together to form a _state_. Douglas did not at first propose to repeal the Missouri Compromise. He intended to leave the question of slavery untouched. He did not want to reopen the agitation, which had been mostly quieted by the Compromise of 1850; but it soon became evident that if he were willing to leave the question in doubt, others were not. Dixon, of Kentucky, successor of Henry Clay in the Senate and a Whig in politics, offered an amendment to the bill proposing to repeal the Missouri Compromise outright. Douglas was rather startled when this motion was made. He went to Dixon's seat and begged him to withdraw his amendment, urging that it would reopen the controversies settled by the Compromise of 1850 and delay, if not prevent, the passage of any bill to organize the new territory. Dixon was stubborn. He contended that the Southern people had a right to go into the new territory equally with those of the North, and to take with them anything that was recognized and protected as property in the Southern States. Dixon's motion received immediate and warm support in the South. Two or three days later, Douglas decided to embody Dixon's amendment in his bill and take the consequences. His amended bill divided the territory in two parts, Kansas and Nebraska. The apparent object of this change was to give the Missourians a chance to make the southernmost one a slave state; but this intention has been controverted by Douglas's friends in recent years, who have brought forward a mass of evidence to show that he had other sufficient reasons for thus dividing the territory and hence that it must not be assumed that he intended that one of them should be a slave state. The evidence consists of a record of efforts put forth by citizens of western Iowa in 1853-54 to secure a future state on the opposite side of the Missouri River homogeneous with themselves, and to promote the building of a Pacific railway from some point near Council Bluffs along the line of the Platte River. These efforts were heartily seconded by Senators Dodge and Jones and Representative Henn, of Iowa. They labored with Douglas and secured his coöperation. So Douglas himself said when he announced the change in the bill dividing the territory into two parts.