U. S. Debts

The states of Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi. North Carolina and South Carolina owe to British creditors repudiated debts, dating from the U.S. Civil War, to a total "with interest to date" of 50 million pounds ($250,000,000), or one-tenth of the present British debt to the U.S.

Such, in essence, was the charge revived last week by the British weekly, Truth, whose editor appended a scathing comment:

"The substance of the whole matter is that the states of the American union owe a very large amount of money, which they are perfectly able to pay and which they ought to pay, but which they will not pay and which they cannot by any of the usual processes employed against delinquent debtors be made to pay."

Historians smiled to recall that, setting aside the repudiated debts of the defunct Southern Confederacy, there was even a time when King Louis XVI of France was vexed by the failure of the U.S. Government to liquidate its debt to his realm.

On Aug. 30, 1785, the French Ambassador to the U.S. reported that he had pressed U.S. Secretary of State John Jay for a settlement, only to receive an evasive and rather plaintive reply:

"France cannot possibly wish to uproot a tree which she has watered with so much care; we would not wish you to think that the United States are becoming ungrateful to a country which has rendered them a great service and which can always give them support against their enemies. It is the interest of both powers to bind closer and closer the ties which unite them."

One week later the French Ambassador wrote home indignantly that "Monsieur John Adams [previously a U.S. negotiant at Paris, later President of the U.S.] has made most false representations of us. . . .

"He has set himself in his despatches to Congress to balancing the services that we have given the U.S. with an exaggerated exposition of the advantages that the Revolution procures for us. He gives an account by the rule of profits and losses, and he concludes from it that it is we who gain the most. Undoubtedly these constant efforts to disparage us must produce their effect on an assembly which forms its opinion of foreign powers mainly on the reports sent by its Ministers in Europe."

The French debts in question were finally wiped out in 1795, though their settlement was arranged partly "in kind" instead of by money payments as was originally intended.