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137 In 1841, the Advocate of Moral Reform printed an editorial describing how the New York Female Moral Reform Society, the group that published the newspaper, was involved in a bitter dispute with its publishing agent. The society had relieved Charles Yale from his position for certain financial irregularities; Yale, in retaliation, had published a pamphlet condemning the society and accusing it of using funds offered for philanthropic purposes for the private benefit of its trustees. The editor noted that a local lawyer and member of the society, Elisha W. Chester, chaired a committee that had investigated Yale, and that Chester had discovered Yale’s offensive pamphlet and provided it to the newspaper. The Advocate added that the society had acted with propriety in the dispute and suggested that a committee led by a man of Chester’s stature was sufficient to prove the legitimacy of the society’s conduct. Chester, the editor declared, was “a gentleman well known to the public, and one who cannot be suspected of any selfish interest in this manner, a man whose opinion could be trusted.” Chester, the paper added in a footnote, was “a very respectable lawyer of this city, whose name will be recognized, when we mention that he is the gentleman associated so honorably with Mr. Wirt in the case of Messrs. Worcester & Butler, the missionaries who were imprisoned in the Georgia Penitentiary.” In his attestation of Chester’s character, the editor of the Advocate was referring to a famous U.S. Supreme Court case, Worcester v. Georgia (1832). Although Samuel A. Worcester and the other named parties in the case were Congregationalist missionaries from the Northeast, the decision also directly affected the fate of the Cherokee Nation and the other Indian nations residing within territory claimed by the United States. In Worcester, Chief Justice John Marshall declared that the Indian tribes represented distinct, The Shades of Loyalty Elisha W. Chester and the Cherokee Removal Tim Alan Garrison 138 Tim Alan Garrison sovereign nations. Chester later used the fact that he had represented the Cherokees and missionaries as a testament to his integrity and to advertise his legal services to elite northeasterners. Chester likely did not tell clients and colleagues that many Cherokees believed he double-crossed them after the case and attempted to push them out of their homeland. Many Cherokee leaders took this view in the years after Worcester, and Chester faced this charge for the rest of his life. In the months after the Worcester ruling, still on retainer for the Cherokees, Chester began taking steps that suggested that he did not have their interests exclusively in mind. Elisha W. Chester was born in 1795 in Groton, Connecticut. In 1818, he graduated from Middlebury College, a Congregationalist school in Vermont . Chester then began preparing for and was admitted to the bar. In the early 1820s, he moved to Georgia. By 1823, he was practicing law in Gwinnett County, just northeast of present-day Atlanta and at the time just a short horseback ride from the southeastern border of the Cherokee Nation. By the late 1820s, Chester had developed a successful practice, was married and the father of two young children, and had purchased two slaves. He was involved in his community and local church and had joined a partnership to establish an academy, which his children would presumably attend when they were ready for schooling. Records do not indicate when Chester and his firm became involved with the Cherokees, but he quickly developed a reputation as a trusted advocate for the tribe. William Rogers, who later became a prominent Cherokee planter, declared in a letter around the time of the Worcester decision that Chester was a “lawyer of some reputation and ability.” By 1820, Georgia ’s congressional delegation, governor, and state legislature were calling on the national government to remove the Cherokees from the state. However, the Cherokee government resisted pressure to cede its lands and refused to contemplate any suggestion of a general removal. The government’s officials consistently maintained that the Cherokee people constituted a sovereign nation that existed independent of the states and under the federal government ’s protection. The United States, they noted, had acknowledged Cherokee sovereignty and territorial rights in the Treaties of Hopewell (1785) and Holston (1791) and several subsequent agreements. In 1827, the Cherokees adopted a republican constitution that asserted to the world their independent , sovereign status. In the late 1820s, the Georgia legislature responded by extending the state’s jurisdiction...

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