Yesterday’s discussion got me thinking about debt, in particular
the political uses of debt. Here, I think that the experience of
the American Revolution and the failure of the Confederacy may
have something to tell us about Mormon history. Consider, for
example, the success of the American Revolution. In the dark
days of the American cause was kept alive in large part by a
trickle of guns and money that came from Holland via the Dutch
controlled island of St. Eustatius. American envoys in Amsterdam
had succeeded in selling bonds issued by the Continental
Congress to Dutch investors. The money generated from these
bonds was then used to purchase weapons, which were shipped out
in Dutch bottoms to the Caribbean, where they were transferred
to American ships that then ran the British blockade into the
colonies. The sale of the bonds — that is the indebtedness of
the nascent American government — was extremely important for
two reasons. First and most immediately it helped the
Continental army to arm and equip i