Note 60 — Chapter V

The movement to abolish imprisonment for debt was a protracted one lasting more than a quarter of a century, and was acrimoniously opposed by the propertied classes, as a whole. By 1836, however, many State legislatures had been induced to repeal or modify the provisions of the various debtors' imprisonment acts. In response to a recommendation by President Andrew Jackson that the practise be abolished in the District of Columbia, a House Select Committee reported on January 17, 1832, that "the system originated in cupidity. It is a confirmation of power in the few against the many; the Patrician against the Plebeian." On May 31, 1836, the House Committee for the District of Columbia, in reporting on the debtors' imprisonment acts, said: "They are disgraceful evidences of the ingenious subtlety by which they were woven into the legal system we adopted from England, and were obviously intended to increase and confirm the power of a wealthy aristocracy by rendering poverty a crime, and subjecting the liberty of the poor to the capricious will of the rich."—Reports of Committees, Second Session, Twenty-second Congress, 1832-33, Report No. 5, and Reports of Committees, First Session, Twenty-fourth Congress, 1836, Report No. 732, ii:2.