In fact, Jackson did not defy the Court. In the case in question, Worcester v. Georgia, he wasn’t even in a position to do so, and he neither practiced nor advocated such misconduct at any other point in his two terms. Although he held expansive views of executive power, which led his political enemies to lambaste him as a lawless enemy of the Constitution, Jackson also believed strongly in the Constitution and never violated a direct court order as Vance would have Trump do. Indeed, Jackson defended the Constitution to the point where he became, prior to Abraham Lincoln, its sturdiest defender against the fractious states’ rights slaveholders of the lower South, whose ideological descendants make up a significant portion of the MAGA coalition.
Worcester v. Georgia was decided by the John Marshall Court in 1832. It did involve Native American sovereignty, but not, strictly speaking, land rights. In 1830, hoping to suppress the disruptive activities of missionaries sympathetic to Cherokee claims to sovereignty—including helping to establish the first Native American newspaper, the Cherokee Phoenix—Georgia’s legislature enacted a statute that prohibited whites from residing on the tribe’s lands without a license from the state. Samuel Worcester, a cofounder of the Phoenix and one of several missionaries tried under the new law, contended that it violated existing treaties between the federal government and the Cherokee nation, but that argument got him nowhere. Sentenced, along with another unyielding missionary, Elizur Butler, to four years of hard labor in a state penitentiary, he appealed to the Supreme Court to quash his conviction.
The Court, in a decision written and delivered by Chief Justice John Marshall, ruled in his favor. Since the Cherokee constituted a separate sovereign nation, Marshall argued, only the federal government had the authority to deal with them, as with any other Native nation. He conceded that conquest or purchase could lead to political domination of one nation over another, but any such authority, he asserted, belonged to the federal government, not the states. Because the state of Georgia had no authority regarding Native American affairs, the statute over which Worcester and others had been convicted was null and void.
Insolent Georgia authorities refused either to release Worcester and Butler or to respect the Supreme Court’s negation of the licensing law. Finally, almost a year after the Court’s ruling, a newly elected governor, hoping to forestall another pro-Cherokee Supreme Court decision, pressed for the offensive law’s repeal and offered Worcester and Butler a pardon and release if they promised no further legal action. After the Cherokee removal began, Worcester wound up accompanying them, with his family, to Indian Territory (what is now Oklahoma), where he died in 1859.