When Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton restructured the government’s miscellaneous debts into more or less their current form in 1791, the national debt was $75 million, or about $18 per person, given the population at that time.
In 191, it was nearly 50,000 times larger.
The national debt in 1991 was $3.7 trillion, or about $14,500 per person, given the current population.