“[W]e view with great concern, both nationally and individually, certain late attempts, on the part of various descriptions of domestic manufacturers, to induce your honorable body to increase the duties upon imports, already so high as to amount, upon many articles, nearly to a prohibition. . . . That, although these attempts are sustained under the plausible pretext of ‘promoting national industry,’ they are calculated (we will not say in design, but certainly in effect) to produce a tax highly impolitic in its nature, partial in its operation, and oppressive in its effects: a tax, in fact to be levied principally on the great body of agriculturists, who constitute a large majority of the whole American people, and who are the chief consumers of all foreign imports. . . .
[I]t is the duty of every wise and just government to secure the consumers against both exorbitant profits and extravagant prices by leaving competition as free and open as possible.”
Virginia Agricultural Society, petition to the House of Representatives, 1820
The arguments expressed in the petition best reflect which of the following developments?
a. Southern plantation owners’ control of most of the region’s land
b. Debates over the federal government’s role in the economy
c. Resistance to Supreme Court decisions limiting states’ rights
d. The Southern economy’s dependence on slave labor