.MTA2NA.NzIzMjU

Library catalogue entry: Payne, John Howard. Autograph manuscript Relating to entitled "Publications Justifying the Decision of the Supreme Court of the United States in the Missionary Case" (Cherokee Indians). 33 pp. 4to handwritten note: back of this Mss is: "Publications justifying the decision of the Supreme Court of the United States in the Missionary Case." In the official paper published at Washington, the Globe, of Saturday, March 31. 1832, there is an essay of twelve columns headed "An examination of the Cherokee question", which seems intended as a review of the late decision of the Supreme Court of the United States in the missionary cause. The Editor invites the attention of the country to this article by the assurance that "it is from the pen of one eminently qualified, by his intimacy with all that concerns in Indian relations, and by his legal and literary attainments, to do justice to the subject." Common rumor has, without contradiction, attributed the article to a member of the present cabinet, and to that member who stands charged with the department to which is confided the administration of our Indian affairs. This circumstance, connected with the marked deference with which the official Editor retires and surrenders his whole columns to this ministerial writer, and his earnest call upon the country to read the paper, give to it an emphasis and importance with which its matter, perhaps, would not have invested it. It has, from these circumstances, very much the air of a government manifesto against the decision of the Supreme Court, to prepare the mind of the people for that resistance on the part of the State of Georgia which the sentence of the Supreme Court has already experienced, and for the acquiesance of the President of the United States in that resistance which this paper itself gives us but too much reason to anticipate. It is thus, in effect, an appeal by the President from the Supreme Court to the people of the United States; an attempt to strip that tribunal, not only of the veneration which has hitherto surrounded it, but to deprive it of its Constitutional power of decision as a court of the last resort; and a call upon the Country to