During this period, the westward push of European-American settlers was continually encroaching on Cherokee territory, even after they had made some land cessions to the US government.

They wanted to take a case to the U.S. Supreme Court to define the relationship between the federal and state governments, and establish the sovereignty of the Cherokee nation.

Hiring William Wirt, a former U.S. Attorney General, the Cherokee argued their position before the U.S. Supreme Court in Georgia v. Tassel.

[2] Worcester and eleven other missionaries met and published a resolution in protest of an 1830 Georgia law prohibiting all white men from living on Native American land without a state license.

Once the law had taken effect, Governor George Rockingham Gilmer ordered the militia to arrest Worcester and the others who signed the document and refused to get a license.

[1] After two series of trials, all eleven men were convicted and sentenced to four years of hard labor at the state penitentiary in Milledgeville.

He acknowledged that the exercise of conquest and purchase can give political dominion, but those are in the hands of the federal government, and individual states had no authority in American Indian affairs.

[5] Marshall's language in Worcester may have been motivated by his regret that his earlier opinions in Fletcher v. Peck and Johnson v. McIntosh had been used as a justification for Georgia's actions.

Joseph Story considered it similarly, writing in a letter to his wife dated March 4, 1832: "Thanks be to God, the Court can wash their hands clean of the iniquity of oppressing the Indians and disregarding their rights.

"[6] In a popular quotation that is believed to be apocryphal, President Andrew Jackson reportedly responded: "John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!

"[7][8] This quotation first appeared twenty years after Jackson's death in newspaper publisher Horace Greeley's 1865 history of the U.S. Civil War, The American Conflict.

[9] In an April 1832 letter to John Coffee, Jackson wrote that "the decision of the Supreme Court has fell still born, and they find that they cannot coerce Georgia to yield to its mandate.

[19] At the same time, the federal government, under Secretary of War Lewis Cass, began an intensive campaign to secure a removal treaty with the Cherokee nation, which would render the Supreme Court decision and Worcester's continued political imprisonment inconsequential.

Senator John Forsyth of Georgia, incoming Vice President Martin Van Buren, and Van Buren's political allies of the Albany Regency began to lobby Lumpkin to offer a pardon, citing the probability that a removal treaty with the Cherokees could be achieved once Worcester and Butler were released from prison.

[31] Two days later, on January 16, President Andrew Jackson sent a message to Congress requesting the military power to put down the South Carolina insurrection.

[37] Removal of the Cherokee nation would begin just three years after Samuel Worcester and Elizur Butler were released from Georgia prison, and forced migration would commence via the Trail of Tears in 1838.

Castro-Huertra was decided to clarify that crimes committed by non-Native Americans on tribal lands would have simultaneous jurisdiction by both federal and state.