Chief Justice John Marshall's Supreme Court ruled in Worcester v. Georgia that the state of Georgia could not extend its laws onto Cherokee Nation land, since only the federal government held authority to deal with Native nations. President Andrew Jackson refused to enforce the ruling, and within years the federal government forcibly removed the Cherokee and other southeastern tribes westward on the Trail of Tears.
Samuel Worcester was a Congregationalist missionary living among the Cherokee in Georgia who ran afoul of a state law requiring white residents in Cherokee territory to obtain a license and swear allegiance to Georgia. Worcester refused, was arrested, and challenged the law's constitutionality, arguing Georgia had no jurisdiction over sovereign Cherokee land at all.
Chief Justice John Marshall's opinion went further than a narrow ruling on Worcester's arrest — it declared that the Cherokee Nation was a distinct political community with its own territory, in which Georgia's laws had no force, and that relations with Native nations belonged exclusively to the federal government under the Constitution. On paper, it was a sweeping affirmation of tribal sovereignty.
President Andrew Jackson, eager to open Cherokee land to white settlement and already committed to a policy of Indian removal, simply declined to enforce the decision, reportedly remarking (in a paraphrase historians still debate the exact wording of) that Marshall could enforce his own ruling if he could. Without federal enforcement, Georgia continued seizing Cherokee land, and by 1838 the US Army forcibly marched thousands of Cherokee people westward in the Trail of Tears, during which roughly 4,000 died of cold, disease, and starvation. The case became a landmark lesson in how a Supreme Court ruling means little without political will to enforce it.