One of the many things that has kept me enthralled with history, in general, and American history, in particular, are the myriad obscure stories that are floating around out there, just begging to be told. This is the ore mined by this web site, which makes it both informative and fun – a great one-two in my book. My school years were blessed with great teachers, and when I hear other adults lament the ‘terminally boring’ experience they had in high school history, it makes me want to weep.

One of my favorite obscure stories centers on a man named Samuel Worcester. You may have heard of him, but most likely you haven’t. If your sensibilities are anything like mine, I warn you in advance. Worester’s story raises a question we all face from time to time: Would I have had the spine and courage to do the same thing?

Samuel Worcester, a devout and unassuming man, was the post master at the U.S. post office in the Cherokee town of New Echota, Georgia, in 1831, when our story begins. The state of Georgia had been trying, unsuccessfully, to get the federal government to evict the Cherokee from lands within the Georgia state borders for more than thirty years. As turning points in history always do, this story turned on an event that no one could have predicted. In the spring of 1831, the State of Georgia declared all treaties with the Indians to be null and void, and they passed a law requiring non-Indians to get permission from the state before entering Indian lands. That’s where the unlikely Mr. Worcester comes in. It seems that Worcester and a group of his Baptist missionary friends decided to ignore the new state law by conducting a church service for Cherokee worshipers in New Echota. It was, after all, Mr. Worcester’s home town.

When the state of Georgia got wind of this, the governor sent constables to arrest all the white people involved in the missionary work in New Echota. They were thrown in the slammer, put on trial and found guilty, and sentenced to four years of hard labor on a state-owned rock pile as punishment for their defiance.

Soon, however, cooler heads took charge in the state capitol. The governor realized that the state may have bitten off more than it could chew with the federal government. In order to save face, the governor offered they missionaries clemency if they would confess to breaking the state law. Seven of the inmates jumped at the deal. Two did not. One of those two was Samuel Worcester. Worcester and his good friend, Dr. Elizur Butler, decided they would continue to make little rocks out of big ones while the larger issues raised by this contretemps played themselves out.

The governor and legislature urged the two ingrates “not to appeal to the Supreme Court of the United States, but to accept of a pardon from the governor of the state, and promise not to return to the Cherokee nation.” In a letter that gives me chills when I read it (and I’ve read it many times), Worcester responds to the state’s offer in a letter that evokes both Sir Thomas More’s self defense three centuries earlier, and Martin Luther King’s defense in “A Letter from the Birmingham Jail.” Worcester wrote:

What are we to gain by the further prosecution of this case?

Our personal liberty? There is much more prospect of gaining it by yielding than by perseverance. And if not, it is not worthy of account in comparison with the interests of our country. Freedom from the stigma of being pardoned criminals? That also is a consideration of personal feeling not to be balanced against the public good.

The arresting of the hand of oppression? It is already decided that such a course cannot arrest it. The prevention of the violation of the public faith? That faith, it appears to us, is already violated; and, as far as we can see, our perseverance has no tendency to restore it.

The privilege of preaching the gospel to the Cherokees? That privilege is at least as likely to be restored by our yielding as by our perseverance. The reputation of being firm and consistent men? Firmness degenerates into obstinacy if it continues when the prospect of good ceases; and the reputation of doing right is dearly purchased by doing wrong.

The prisoners’ resolve was not to be dislodged. In their opinion, what the state was doing to their friends, the Cherokees, was a moral and legal outrage that demanded the attention of a higher court. Until the case came to trial they would continue smashing rocks in the Georgia sun. Accordingly, Worcester and Doctor Butler asked William Wirt to file a suit on their behalf, and Wirt, the former attorney general of the United States, took the case. Worcester’s case to the high court complained that the state had overstepped its Constitutional authority by trespassing on Cherokee lands. Further, they argued that their civil rights had been violated and that the state had unlawfully abrogated the Cherokee’s Treaty of Holston. Rather than marvel at the resolute fortitude and principled sacrifice of these two men, the governor and legislature were enraged by their bold presumptions.

The case, Worcester v. Georgia, was heard by John Marshall’s court in the spring of 1831. In his ruling for the majority, the great chief justice found that 1) the state of Georgia had no authority to violate Worcester and Butler’s civil liberties, and 2) had no expressed right to extend its jurisdiction onto the lands of a sovereign people, and 3) had no authority to abrogate the tribe’s treaty with the federal government. Georgia’s actions were extensions of authority it never possessed:

The acts of Georgia are repugnant to the Constitution, laws, and treaties of the United States. They interfere forcibly with the relations established between the United States and the Cherokee nation, the regulation of which…are committed exclusively to the government of the union [which] recognizes the pre-existing power of the [Cherokee] nation to govern itself.

It was also the high court’s opinion that the state’s judgment condemning Samuel A. Worcester and Elizur Butler to hard labor “is void, as being repugnant to the Constitution, treaties, and laws of the United States, and ought, therefore, to be reversed and annulled.”

To this day, the court’s opinion in Worcester reverberates in aftershocks that rumble periodically through the bedrock of federalism. When the state of Washington sought to deny Indians access to ancestral shellfish harvests, in 1998, the U.S. Supreme Court cited Worcester in finding for the tribes. When the Mille Lacs band of Chippewa demanded their usufructory rights right to fish on their ancestral lakes, in 1997, Sandra Day O’Connor reminded an indignant Antonin Scalia and William Rehnquist that the federal government had an unimpeachable trust relationship with the tribes that was secured in perpetuity by Worcester. When the Salish-Kootenai tribes of Montana imposed water quality standards on non-Indian residents living on their reservation, including a white town, in 1996, Worcester applied. When the Yaqui and Pequot and Santa Rosa Pueblo went to court to open tribal casinos, Marshall’s opinion in Worcester was the argument cited. The principles established by Worcester have since been invoked in hundreds of Indian law cases where jealous state governments have sought to encroach on tribal resources or to restrict tribal sovereignty. All thanks to a humble post master with an unerring moral compass and the courage to be guided by it.

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