Debtor Diplomacy: Finance and American Foreign Relations in the Civil War ... - University Lecturer in American History Jay Sexton, Jay Sexton - Google Books

https://books.google.de/books?id=TuepT3C0TCsC&pg=PA72&dq=Mississippi+1841+repudiation#v=onepage

The United States was a debtor nation in the mid-nineteenth century, with half of its national debt held overseas. Lacking the resources to develop the nation and to fund the wars necessary to expand and then preserve it, the United States looked across…