article_snippet.sent: the Constitution is always and everywhere the supreme law of the land -- no matter what an individual state says.
article_snippet.sent: At the outbreak of the American Revolution, the Old Dominion was already a century and a half old.
article_snippet.sent: That brighter future also involved freedom from slavery.
article_snippet.sent: The Old Northwest had always been free soil, as provided for by a Northwest Ordinance that predated the U.S. Constitution.  
article_snippet.sent: True, geography is not inexorable destiny.
article_snippet.sent: But geographic variation has always been a large part of America's constitutional saga.