How did our founders plan to pay that debt?

I mean, land really was essential to how they thought they were gonna address this, this fiscal crisis.

You know, members of the Continental Congress, state legislators, state governors look west, and they see what they believe to be a vast expanse of land that, like, more than is theirs for the taking, that they have already taken.

As patriots are looking westward, they're thinking about trying to solve their financial problems by selling off what is, in reality, other people's land.

Through an orgy of corruption and greed, 18th-century finance bros bought almost 100 million acres of land from the government.

We're talking about basically half of present-day Ohio, the western third of present-day New York, the western third or so of Pennsylvania, pretty much all of Kentucky and Tennessee, and big chunks of Alabama and Mississippi, not to mention Georgia itself.

And my gosh, all of West Virginia, [laughs] and a huge extent of Maine.