His practice as a lawyer was a very lucrative one to have been acquired at so early an age. As an evidence of the esteem in which his abilities and learning were held, he was, at the age of twenty-seven, when he had been a lawyer but four years, retained as counsel for the State of North Carolina, with George E. Badger, in a most complicated mass of litigation, involving the title to more land than was ever sued for under one title in our State (except, perhaps, that instituted by the heirs of Lord Granville in 1804). Several hundred thousand acres of land had been granted to William Cathcart, Huldeman, and Elseman, citizens of Pennsylvania, lying in the counties of Burke, Buncombe, Haywood, and Macon. Subsequently, these same lands, in great part, were sold in smaller lots to settler citizens by the State, under the belief that when patented originally by Cathcart and others they were not subject to entry, for the reason that they were within the boundaries which had been reserved to the Indians by various treaties. One hundred suits in ejectment were brought against these settlers in the Circuit Court of the United States by the heirs of Cathcart. All these actions were dependent on similar facts, and each one involved the validity, accuracy, and definite character of various surveys made at sundry different times during a period of nearly half a century previous thereto, under treaties between the State and the Cherokee Indians, and between the United States and the same Indian tribe. The State resolved to defend the titles it had given to its citizens, and employed Badger and Swain to contend with Mr. Gaston, who was for the plaintiffs--a very high compliment to both of them. Here was a field wherein Governor Swain had no superior, and where his peculiar talents came specially into play. A complicated maze of long-forgotten facts was to be resurrected from buried documents, dimly traced surveyors' lines and corners through hundreds of miles of tangled mountain forests were to be established, partly by the evidence of old grey-haired woodmen and partly by the fading outlines of the rude maps and indistinct field-notes of the surveyors of that day; and old treaties and musty statutes were to be brought out of the dust and made to speak in behalf of the rights of our people. In such a work his soul delighted, and to his faithful labors and indefatigable energy must the final success of the State be mainly attributed. For though he was put on the bench, and from the bench was made Governor before the test case was tried in 1832, and the victory won, he never ceased his labors in this behalf, and his official letter-book of that period is filled with evidences of his zeal and research. Judge Badger, who was as generous as he was great, and who followed the case up to the Supreme Court of the United States, where he was assisted by Mr. Webster, frankly acknowledged that the cause was won mainly by the careful preparation of Swain.