I believe the answer is
B. This pamphlet calmly disputed the claims that had been made in favor of slavery and provided ordinary citizens and abolitionists with arguments explaining why slavery was wrong.
A. Distinctive has a positive connotation because connotation is the emotional feeling of a word and distinctive is like special which is good.
Answer: C) It is a dependent clause.
Explanation: an independent clause is a sentence that has complete meaning on its own (it has at least a subject, a verb and all the necessary complements), a dependent clause is the contrary, is a phrase that, in order to make sense, it needs to be with an independent clause. The given excerpt is a clear example of a dependent clause, because as we can see, it doesn't have complete sense, we can tell that it is missing something.
