To be fair, part of this is that since around that time the major English speaking countries of note could print the money the bonds were issued in (first the British Empire, now the American one).
This means that there may have been "effective defaults" where instead of defaulting on the bond, the currency was weakened.
If I'm reading the sources correctly, the CSA never technically defaulted until it ceased to exist as a meaningful entity. The CSA never paid the interest on the junk bonds, but those bonds appeared to have a clause permitting it to defer any payments while the war was ongoing; the cotton bonds were actually serviced in full throughout the entire war.
Yeah, this. You can’t go broke if you can print the money. What is going to be interesting in the next 10y is BTC denominated bonds. Then we will see exactly who can and will default.
This means that there may have been "effective defaults" where instead of defaulting on the bond, the currency was weakened.
There's also the question if the CSA were ever really a "major English-speaking country" because they did default: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confederate_war_finance