Guardian: The history of British slave ownership has been buried: now its scale can be revealed

[Uncle Joe]

18. I believe it would've been, to say the national debt exploded from the Civil War is an

understatement.

http://fee.org/freeman/detail/the-economic-costs-of-the-civil-war/

The first and most important point is that the Civil War was expensive. In 1860 the U.S. national debt was $65 million. To put that in perspective, the national debt in 1789, the year George Washington took office, was $77 million. In other words, from 1789 to 1860, the United States spanned the continent, fought two major wars, and began its industrial growth—all the while reducing its national debt.

(snip)

Four years of civil war changed all that forever. In 1865 the national debt stood at $2.7 billion. Just the annual interest on that debt was more than twice our entire national budget in 1860. In fact, that Civil War debt is almost twice what the federal government spent before 1860.

Putting aside just the monetary cost, there was well over 600,000 lives snuffed out, the South was left in economic devastation which took near a century to recover from.

On top of that the bitter Civil War created a major cultural and social fault line from which our nation stills suffers from to this day.