The correct answer is letter A. Foreign competitions
drove the price of cotton down. Due to Abraham Lincoln’s Union Blockade, the
South was not able to market their millions of bales of cotton. He had the
precautionary measure that Europe would intervene with the export of cotton,
but they did not. As a result, cotton production increased in other parts of
the world (e.g. India and Egypt) making America lose its monopoly in the cotton
industry.
