ircumstances, of the nature of real estate. They may enact that these
claims shall be hereditary, both as regards the claimant and the person
held to service, so that heirs shall inherit them,--and also so that the
children of apprentices, or of slaves, shall, in virtue of their birth, be
apprentices or slaves. But State laws or State constitutions, whatever
their provisions, cannot modify the Constitution of the United States. The
Supreme Court has decided that "the Government of the Union, though
limited in its power, is supreme within its sphere of action"; and again,
that "the laws of the United States, when made in pursuance of the
Constitution, form the supreme law of the land, anything in the
constitution or laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding."[7]

[Footnote 7: "_McCulloch against the State of Maryland._" 4
Wheaton, _Rep._, p. 316.]

Therefore State laws or constitutions can neither determine the
interpretation of the Federal Constitution nor explain its intent. It is
to be interpreted by the words, fairly and candidly construed, of its
framers.

In the provision under consideration the phraseology is remarkable. The
word _slave_, though then in common use, to designate a negro held to
service or labor for life, is not employed. It is impossible to believe
that this peculiarity was accidental, or to overlook the inevitable
inference from it. This provision does not recognize slavery except as it
recognizes apprenticeship. African slavery, according to the expressly
selected words, and therefore according to the manifest intent, of the
framers of the Constitution, is here recognized as a claim to the service
or labor of a negro: nothing more, nothing else.

It avails nothing to allege, even if it were true, that in 1787, when
these words were written, a negro was commonly considered property.
Chief-Justice Taney, delivering the decision of the Supreme Court in the
Dred Scott case, asserts that in the thirteen colonies which formed the
Constitution "a negro of the African race was regarded as an article of
property." This may or it may not have been true of a majority in those
days. True or not, it refers only to the opinions of individual colonists;
and these cannot be received as a basis of construction for the words, nor
can they rebut the plain intent, of a constitutional provision. It is not
what individual colonists believed, but what the framers of the
Constitution incorporated in t