"Our farmers, who once found no market for their surplus wheat except to feed it to their cattle or distill it into whiskey, now find a ready market at high prices. The canal has brought New York to our very doors. Goods from the Atlantic ports—sugar, tea, iron, and manufactured cloths—which were once rare luxuries brought over the mountains by wagon at great expense, are now common and cheap in every village along the line. The isolation of our western valleys is at an end, and we are now fully joined in interest and commerce with our brethren in the East."
—Letter from an Ohio merchant to a relative in Boston, 1832
Which of the following developments in the early nineteenth century best explains the economic changes described in the excerpt?
- The creation of state-funded and private transportation networks that integrated the agricultural West with the Northeastern marketsAnswer
- BThe federal government's direct assumption of all internal improvement costs to establish a uniform national highway system
- CThe rapid transition of the Southern plantation economy away from cotton production toward domestic industrial manufacturing
- DThe immediate implementation of federal regulations over interstate commerce by the Marshall Court to dismantle state-chartered monopolies