Debt Contract: Fill & Download for Free

Debts contracted by the national government of the CSA were never paid off. There was no government left to collect them from. Those who invested in Confederate bonds or who made contracts with the CSA government knew they were gambling on the Confederates winning their independence, and when they failed, they lost their bets.I actually own a $500 Confederate States of America bond that was issued in 1862 with a maturity date in 1868. It had a series of interest coupons attached that the bond’s owner could redeem every six months, with the dates written on them. This one was actually being redeemed, because all of the coupons up to 1 July 1865 had been removed; the last one to be used would have been the one for 1 January 1865. You occasionally see these bonds with all of the original coupons, more than likely because they were purchased by overseas investors.Confederate bonds and paper money often came with indeterminate redemption dates, based on a future date when the CSA and USA would make a peace treaty and end the war. Confederate dollars (I have some of those too) were not backed with hard assets like gold, simply a promise to redeem the notes six months after peace was concluded. What little hard currency (gold) the Confederacy had was used to purchase munitions from Europe. Had the Confederates won the war in possession of Union territory, they would have no doubt exchanged it for hard currency. When Jubal Early and the Confederate Second Corps nearly seized Washington, D.C. in a coup de main in July 1864, they intended to clean out the U.S. Treasury before leaving. Reinforcements sent by Grant at the eleventh hour saved the capital and Treasury.Most debts incurred by the individual states of the Confederacy were honored, although this sometimes did not happen until after the former Confederates regained control of the state governments in the South, in the late 1860s and early 1870s. The Reconstruction governments of those states considered the Confederate-era governments and their agreements to be illegitimate, but when the so-called Redeemers took power, they did of course consider the Confederate governments legitimate.

I propose, then, a seemingly drastic but actually far less destructive way of paying off the public debt at a single blow: outright debt repudiation. Consider this question: why should the poor, battered citizens of Russia or Poland or the other ex-Communist countries be bound by the debts contracted by their former Communist masters? In the Communist situation, the injustice is clear: that citizens struggling for freedom and for a free-market economy should be taxed to pay for debts contracted by the monstrous former ruling class.But this injustice only differs by degree from "normal" public debt. For, conversely, why should the Communist government of the Soviet Union have been bound by debts contracted by the Czarist government they hated and overthrew? And why should we, struggling American citizens of today, be bound by debts created by a past ruling elite who contracted these debts at our expense?One of the cogent arguments against paying blacks "reparations" for past slavery is that we, the living, were not slaveholders. Similarly, we the living did not contract for either the past or the present debts incurred by the politicians and bureaucrats in Washington. — Murray Rothbard

Debt is neither moral or immoral. You find morality in human actions, not in states of being. Contracting to lend or borrow, fulfilling a debt contract or defaulting on it, these are actions where we can look for moral characteristics.