The answer to your question is option 3. The southern slaveholders claimed that the north benefited from slavery because they pointed out that the North’s textile industry depended on southern cotton.
Explanation:
As you may know, slaves in the south worked mainly on the cotton fields. Because harvesting cotton required a very large group of people, slaves were brought and the cotton industry skyrocketed. The south became rich for their cotton production and the north’s textile industry also benefited as they now had a bigger suppy of cotton to work with.
Because the industry was doing so well and people were making more money, the North defended slavery by showing how much the textile industry had benefited from the cotton harvested in the south by slaves. Since the textile industry depended entirely on the cotton harvested by slaves in the South, the North argued that the sudden end to the slave economy would a profound and killing economic impact since the cotton economy would collapse.
