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Money As Debt


The Money Masters


Freedom to Fascism

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The United States Public Debt, 1861 to 1975 (Franklin Noll, Ph.D.)

Note: The statistics used in this article are available in Microsoft Excel format
On January 1, 1790, the United States' public debt stood at $52,788,722.03 (Bayley 31). It consisted of the debt of the Continental Congress and $191,608.81 borrowed by Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton in the spring of 1789 from New York banks to meet the new government's first payroll (Bayley 108). Since then the public debt has passed by a number of historical milestones: the assumption of Revolutionary War debt in August 1790, the redemption of the debt in 1835, the financing innovations rising from Civil War in 1861, the introduction of war loan drives in 1917, the rise of deficit spending after 1932, the lasting expansion of the debt from World War II, and the passage of the Budget Control Act in 1975. (The late 1990s may mark another point of significance in the history of the public debt, but it is still too soon to tell.) This short study examines the public debt between the Civil War and the Budget Control Act, the period in which the foundations of our present public debt of over $7 trillion were laid. (See Figure 1, above.)

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