How much of that debt beyond their obligations was for subsidization of Northern industries I wonder?
See #1597 and subtract normal expenses from total expenses. That gives you a fairly accurate figure.
Southern infrastructure spending was largely privately financed. That included railroads, dredging, and roads.
In June, 1860, a loan of twenty million dollars had been authorized by Congress. Of this amount, ten million was offered in October in a five per cent stock, and it had been bought by investors.
Before any installments were paid, the secession panic that followed the election affected credit, and many bids were withdrawn.
This so seriously crippled the Treasury Department, that as the New Year approached, it seemed likely there would be no funds with which to meet the interest on the National debt....essentially the failure of the Union treasury was at hand.
By the Act of December 17th, 1860, an issue of ten million dollars, in treasury notes, was authorized, to bear a rate of interest as might be offered by the lowest bidders, but so shaken was credit, few bids were made, and some of them at a rate of thirty-six per cent interest per annum.
The investors interested in the Government credit finally took one million five hundred thousand dollars of one-year treasury notes, at twelve per cent per annum (the amount was subsequently raised to five million dollars), on condition that the money should be applied to paying the interest on the national debt.
This was certainly a dark day in the Capitol, when the Federal Government, which had earned the honor of being the only nation that had ever paid its debts in full—principal and interest—and which in 1856, with an overflowing treasury, had paid twenty-two per cent premium for its own stock, was now reduced to give twelve per cent interest, for a few millions, and to engage to protect its credit with the money.
This, combined with the reality that as soon as the primary cotton and tobacco producing states seceded with the subsequent massive loss in exportable products, that the US Treasury was in extreme jeopardy.
The Civil War fiscal crisis began before April 12, 1861. The U.S. Treasury tottered in a state of utmost confusion months before the firing on Fort Sumter.
Traditionally the “dynamic center” of government, the Treasury now faced “being placed before the world in the aspect of a mendicant.” The department's secretary, John A. Dix, notified Congress on February 11, 1861 that “little more” than $500,000 remained in the central depository in Washington.
Demands for $2 million “unanswered” requisitions had accumulated in the department, with $6 million more due to public creditors in early March. Dix predicted a $21.6 million shortfall by the end of the fiscal year.
Staff in most executive departments could not draw their salaries that January. Members of Congress had gone unpaid since the start of the session the previous December. Worse yet, according to Dix, “The War and Navy departments have calls for large requisitions [that] have been delayed on account of the exhausted condition of the Treasury.”