These documents come from the case file for Worcester v. Georgia. The Supreme Court sent them to the Gwinnett County Superior Court in Georgia to notify them that they’d overruled their decision. The Supreme Court wrote that Samuel Worcester and Elizur Butler’s defense of their indictment, arrest, and imprisonment “ought to have been allowed and admitted.” The first document pertains to Worcester and the second to Butler.
Worcester and Butler had plead not guilty to the charge of failing to obtain a permit or license to reside on Cherokee land. In 1830, Georgia had passed a law requiring non-Cherokee to obtain a permit from the state of Georgia to do so. A group of missionaries, including Worcester and Butler, were indicted by a grand jury after they went to live on Cherokee land in Georgia, with permission from the Cherokee Nation and the U.S. Government. The Superior Court of Gwinnet in Georgia found them guilty, and sentenced them to four years of hard labor.
The men appealed. After they were unsuccessful in the highest state court, they appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court on a writ of error (which demands the lower court provide the full record to a higher court for review of errors) in Worcester v. Georgia. The Federal question raised (necessary to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court) was whether the state of Georgia had jurisdiction, since the men were present in the territory under authority of the U.S. President doing missionary work, and with the permission of the Cherokee Nation. In other words, did the state of Georgia have the authority to hear the case or to pass laws concerning sovereign Indian nations?
The question had been asked of the Supreme Court before. In 1828, Georgia had passed a series of acts taking away rights of Cherokees residing within the state, including Cherokee removal from land that the state wanted. The Cherokee asserted that Georgia did not have the jurisdiction or authority to do these things, since the Cherokee Nation was sovereign and protected under a treaty with the United States. They sought an injunction — or order to stop what the State of Georgia was doing — from the U.S. Supreme Court in Cherokee Nation v. Georgia in 1831. The Supreme Court said they lacked jurisdiction to hear the case and it was dismissed, leaving the Cherokee at the mercy of the laws of the state of Georgia.
In Worcester v. Georgia in 1832, however, the Supreme Court ruled that states, like Georgia, could not diminish rights of tribes because the Cherokee Nation constituted a nation holding distinct sovereign powers as granted by Congress and the United States. This established the principle of “tribal sovereignty.” The Court also issued a mandate to release Worcester and Butler.
Georgia ignored the ruling, however, and did not release the men. President Andrew Jackson did not intervene to enforce the Supreme Court ruling. (Georgia Governor Wilson Lumpkin pardoned Butler and Worcester in 1833.)
So the judicial branch handed down a ruling that should have freed Butler and Worcester and established more sovereignty for the tribes; but it didn’t have that effect because the executive branch did not enforce it.
