12. Why did the southern cotton industry have a hard time recovering after the Civil War?

A. Foreign competition drove the price of cotton down.

B. Clothes were no longer made out of cotton.

C. Temperature changed so much that cotton couldn't be grown in the South.

D. Cotton became too expensive to process.

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.