Worcester v. Georgia

Summary

In the late 1820s the Cherokee Nation, whose lands lay largely within Georgia's chartered limits, adopted a written constitution. Georgia responded by extending its jurisdiction over Cherokee country, and the discovery of gold in 1829 sharpened the conflict. In 1830 Congress passed the Indian Removal Act, and in 1831 the Court, in Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, declined to hear a suit by the Nation on the ground that it was not a foreign state. A Georgia act of 22 December 1830 required every white person living in the Cherokee Nation to obtain a license from the governor and swear an oath to support the laws of Georgia. Samuel A. Worcester, a Vermont-born missionary of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, and his colleague Elizur Butler refused, were convicted in the Superior Court of Gwinnett County, and were sentenced to four years at hard labour. They brought writs of error to the Supreme Court. William Wirt and John Sergeant argued for Worcester that the Constitution gave the regulation of relations with Indian nations exclusively to the national government; that the treaties of Hopewell (1785) and Holston (1791) and the federal intercourse acts guaranteed the Cherokee their lands and self-government; and that the Georgia statute contradicting them was void. Georgia sent no counsel. Its position, stated by its governor and legislature, was that the state held sovereignty over all territory within its boundaries, that the United States had promised in the Compact of 1802 to extinguish Indian title within Georgia, and that the Court had no authority over the state's criminal judgments. On 3 March 1832 the Court reversed the convictions, 5-1. After holding the record properly before the Court under the Judiciary Act of 1789, Chief Justice Marshall traced the history of European claims by discovery, the British crown's dealings with the tribes and the treaties of the United States, concluding that discovery gave rights only against other European powers and that the Indian nations remained distinct political communities. The Cherokee Nation was therefore a distinct community in which the laws of Georgia could have no force, and the act under which Worcester was prosecuted was void. Justice McLean concurred separately; Justice Baldwin dissented on the ground that the record was not properly certified. The library text includes the reporter's statement of the Georgia statute and the record, Marshall's opinion, and an excerpt from McLean's concurrence; footnotes and Baldwin's dissent are absent. Georgia refused to release the missionaries, and the Court adjourned without a further means of compelling compliance. Worcester and Butler were freed by Governor Wilson Lumpkin in January 1833 after withdrawing their suit. A minority faction of Cherokee leaders signed the Treaty of New Echota in 1835, and in 1838-1839 federal troops removed the Cherokee to the Indian Territory west of the Mississippi on the journey remembered as the Trail of Tears, during which several thousand died.

Top Lessons

• Nations within a nation

  Marshall describes the Cherokee as a distinct people with their own territory and government, connected to the United States by treaty and protection rather than absorbed into a state. His reasoning draws on the law of nations: a weaker power that places itself under a stronger one's protection does not thereby give up self-government.

• What discovery did and did not convey

  Marshall reinterprets the European doctrine of discovery: it settled competing claims among European powers and gave the discoverer the exclusive right to purchase land, but it did not give title over the native inhabitants or their government. Royal charters that drew lines across the continent conveyed only what the crown actually held.

• Georgia's claim of sovereignty

  Georgia regarded the Cherokee lands as part of its own territory, guaranteed to it by the boundaries of its royal charter and by the 1802 compact in which the United States had promised to extinguish Indian title. The state saw a separate government within its borders as incompatible with its sovereignty and refused to appear before a federal court it believed had no authority over it.

• When a judgment is not obeyed

  The Court reversed the convictions, but Georgia did not release the missionaries, and the federal executive took no action to compel it. The case shows that judicial decisions depend on the cooperation of other branches and of the states. The often-repeated line attributed to Jackson, that Marshall had made his decision and should now enforce it, is not reliably documented.

• A missionary's conscience

  Worcester and Butler could have avoided prison by taking Georgia's oath or leaving the Nation, as most of their fellow missionaries did. They refused, believing the oath would deny the rights the Cherokee held under federal treaties and abandon the people they served. Their decision to remain imprisoned rather than accept a pardon on the state's terms kept the case alive.

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Medical Lens

Elizur Butler was a missionary physician, but the opinions concern jurisdiction, treaties and tribal sovereignty and say nothing about medicine.