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CHAPTER SEVEN: Sovereign Nations: Worcester v. Georgia
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chapter seven Sovereign Nations Worcester v. Georgia the major newspapers in alabama and georgia did not mention James Caldwell’s case. Instead, editorial interest remained focused on Georgia, where a group of Congregational missionaries were challenging the state’s authority to extend its jurisdiction over the Cherokee Nation. By the 1820s, more than thirty missionaries from several Christian denominations were attempting to win converts in the Cherokee Nation. Funded in part by the United States government, these ministers were also responsible for instructing the Cherokees in the ways and means of American culture, politics, and economics. In 1825 the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions , a Congregationalist evangelical group, sent Samuel A. Worcester to their Cherokee mission in Brainerd, Tennessee. Worcester was the nephew of the founder of the American Board, the eighth generation in a long line of Congregational pastors, and a former student and disciple of Jeremiah Evarts. Two years later, the board ordered Worcester to the Cherokee national capital of New Echota. There, with Elias Boudinot and other missionaries and acolytes, Worcester helped translate the Bible and other Christian inspirational materials into the Cherokee language. Worcester quickly earned the trust of the Cherokee leaders and often advised the national government on its political and legal rights under the U.S. Constitution and federal-Cherokee treaties. The Congregationalist missionary was also instrumental in the establishment of the Cherokee Phoenix under Boudinot’s editorship . By 1830 Worcester had emerged as the most important non-Indian advocate of Cherokee sovereignty in the nation. Worcester’s pedigree and his record of benevolent service made him a credible voice among American Christians when he criticized Georgia’s Indian policy.1 Since Worcester had close access to Boudinot and the Cherokee Phoenix, Georgia officials identified him as one of the primary instigators of the Cherokee sovereignty movement. The state also focused its attention on Elizur Butler, a physician serving the American Board at its mission and where a group of Congregationalist missionaries were challenging the state’s of Congregationalist pastors, and a former student and disciple of Jeremiah 170 the legal ideology of removal school at Haweis. Dr. Butler arrived in the Cherokee Nation soon after Worcester and became known as an advocate for Cherokee rights. George Gilmer, Wilson Lumpkin, and other Georgia politicians recognized that Worcester, Butler, and other missionaries were not just spreading the gospel, they were also encouraging the Cherokees to resist removal. Prominent removal proponents in the state suggested to the Georgia General Assembly that if it could eliminate the influence of the missionaries, the state might be more successful in forcing the Cherokees to relocate. As a result, during the Tassel tumult, the legislature promulgated a statute that prohibited “white persons” from residing within the Cherokee Nation without permission from the state and gave them until March 1, 1831, to either leave the nation or obtain a license of residency from the Georgia government. The statute required white men who wished to remain among the Cherokees to take an oath to “support and defend the constitution and laws of the state of Georgia” and provided that violators of the law would be guilty of “high misdemeanors” and subject to imprisonment at hard labor for four years. The state sent copies of the new law to all of the missionaries and to every other white person known to be residing in the Cherokee Nation. The authors of the legislation knew that they would force the evangelical troublemakers either out of the state or into prison, for Governor Gilmer intended to refuse residency permits to any person who was known to oppose removal. This law, Gilmer believed, would ultimately silence white friends of the Cherokees like Worcester and Butler.2 The Cherokees responded to the act with indignation. Elias Boudinot wrote that the legislation not only violated Cherokee sovereignty, it was “certainly oppressive on the whites.” Why should they have to take an oath, Boudinot asked, if they were already citizens of the state? In its lust to cleanse the state of Indians, he said, Georgia was now encroaching upon the civil liberties of its own people. Moreover, he added, the law inhibited the Cherokee Nation from bringing in ministers, teachers, carpenters, blacksmiths, and mechanics to instruct the Cherokees in Anglo-American ways. “The tendency of such a law,” Boudinot concluded, “forces from [the Cherokees] the very means of their improvement in religion and morals, and in the arts of civilized life.”3 At almost the exact...