ROYCE. TREATY OF DECEMBER 29, 1835. 265 
United States. The superior court overruled this plea, and Mr. Wor- 
cester was tried, convicted, and sentenced to four years in the peniten- 
tiary. 
The case was carried up on a writ of error to the Supreme Court of 
the United States, and that court asserted its jurisdiction. In render- 
ing its decision the court remarks that the principle that discovery of 
parts of the continent of America gave title to the government by 
whose subjects or by whose authority it was made against all other 
European governments, which title might be consummated by posses- 
sion, was acknowledged by all Europeans because it was the interest of 
all to acknowledge it, and because it gave to the nation making the dis- 
covery, aS its inevitable consequence, the sole right of acquiring the 
soil and of making settlements on it. It was an exclusive principle 
which shut out the right of competition among those who had agreed 
to it, but not one which could annul the rights of those who had not 
agreed to it. It regulated the rights of the discoverers among them- 
selves, but could not affect the rights of those already in possession as 
aboriginal occupants. It gave the exclusive right of purchase, but did 
not found it on a denial of the right of the possessor to sell. The United 
States succeeded to all the claims of Great Britain, both territorial and 
political. Soon after Great Britain had determined on planting colonies 
in America the King granted sundry charters to his subjects. They 
purport generally to convey the soil from the Atlantic to the South Sea. 
The soil was occupied by numerous warlike nations, willing and able to 
defend their possessions. The absurd idea that feeble settlements made 
on the sea-coast acquired legitimate power to govern the people or oc- 
cupy the lands from sea to sea did not then enter the mind of any 
man. These charters simply conferred the right of purchasing such 
lands as the natives were willing to sell. The acknowledgment of 
dependence made in the various Cherokee treaties with Great Britain 
and the United States merely bound them as a dependent ally claiming 
the protection of a powerful friend and neighbor and receiving the 
advantages of that protection, without involving a surrender of their 
national character. Neither the Government nor the Cherokees ever 
understood it otherwise. Protection did not imply the destruction of 
the protected. 
Georgia herself had furnished conclusive evidence that her former 
opinions on the subject of the Indians concurred with those entertained 
by her sister States and by the Goverfiment of the United States. Vari- 
ous acts of her legislature had been cited in the argument of the case, 
including the contract of cession made in 1802, all tending to prove 
her acquiescence in the universal conviction that the Cherokee Nation 
possessed a full right to the lands they occupied, until that right should 
be extinguished by the United States with their consent; that their ter- 
ritory was separated from that of any State within whose chartered lim- 
its they might reside, by a boundary line established by treaties; that 
