The case was carried up on a writ of error to the Supreme Court of the United States, and that court asserted its jurisdiction. In rendering its decision the court remarks that the principle that discovery of parts of the continent of America gave title to the government by whose subjects or by whose authority it was made against all other European governments, which title might be consummated by possession, was acknowledged by all Europeans because it was the interest of all to acknowledge it, and because it gave to the nation making the discovery, as its inevitable consequence, the sole right of acquiring the soil and of making settlements on it. It was an exclusive principle which shut out the right of competition among those who had agreed to it, but not one which could annul the rights of those who had not agreed to it. It regulated the rights of the discoverers among themselves, but could not affect the rights of those already in possession as aboriginal occupants. It gave the exclusive right of purchase, but did not found it on a denial of the right of the possessor to sell. The United States succeeded to all the claims of Great Britain, both territorial and political. Soon after Great Britain had determined on planting colonies in America the King granted sundry charters to his subjects. They purport generally to convey the soil from the Atlantic to the South Sea. The soil was occupied by numerous warlike nations, milling and able to defend their possessions. The absurd idea that feeble settlements made on the sea-coast acquired legitimate power to govern the people or occupy the lands from sea to sea did not then enter the mind of any man. These charters simply conferred the right of purchasing such lands as the natives were willing to sell. The acknowledgment of dependence made in the various Cherokee treaties with Great Britain and the United States merely bound them as a dependent ally claiming the protection of a powerful friend and neighbor and receiving the advantages of that protection, without involving a surrender of their national character. Neither the Government nor the Cherokees ever understood it otherwise. Protection did not imply the destruction of the protected.