Removal, Worcester v. Georgia and the Trail of Tears

In eighteen thirty-one, the state of Georgia passed a law requiring all white men living in Cherokee territory to obtain a state license. It was designed to expel missionaries who were helping the Cherokee defend their land in court. Two missionaries, Samuel Worcester and Elizur Butler, refused and were imprisoned. Worcester appealed, and the case went to the United States Supreme Court.

In eighteen thirty-two, Chief Justice John Marshall delivered the decision in Worcester versus Georgia. The opinion was unambiguous: Georgia had no authority over the Cherokee Nation, whose territory was sovereign under federal treaty. Marshall wrote that the Cherokee were a distinct community occupying their own territory. The laws of Georgia could have no force there.

Andrew Jackson is widely reported to have said something like, John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it. The quote's exact origin is debated, but what happened next is not. Jackson ignored the ruling. Georgia ignored the ruling. In eighteen thirty-five a small faction of Cherokee signed the Treaty of New Echota, ceding all Cherokee land east of the Mississippi. The principal chief, John Ross, rejected it as fraudulent. The vast majority of the nation rejected it. Congress ratified it anyway.

In eighteen thirty-eight and eighteen thirty-nine, United States soldiers rounded up approximately sixteen thousand Cherokee men, women, and children and marched them more than a thousand miles west to present-day Oklahoma. Approximately four thousand died along the way, from disease, exposure, and exhaustion. The Cherokee called it Nunna daul Tsuny, the trail where they cried. We call it the Trail of Tears. Georgia's gold fields, opened at Dahlonega a decade earlier, had made the final push irresistible.