Early in the Horton controversy, the paper asked why some people seemed to care so much about free African Americans when white people faced abuse and incarceration simply for being poor. The cruelest laws were not those that forced African Americans to carry passes and certificates of freedom, the Intelligencer maintained. They were the debtor laws that shoved “white people” into prison because they couldn’t pay their creditors. Those very same debtor laws, the paper observed, exempted slaves, who were in the fortunate position of having no financial responsibility for themselves.
