The South's post-Civil War backwardness was due to all of the following except

(a) extensive wartime destruction of life and property.
(b) the fiscal disaster of the Confederacy, whereby nine tenths of the state banks in the South vanished.
(c) the price of cotton was increasing, as it had prior to the Civil War, thus keeping cotton profitable and discouraging investors in the South from developing a modern manufacturing system.
(d) the failure of the sharecropping system to provide incentives for innovation and progress
in agriculture.

(c)