"King Cotton" Failed the South as a Tool of Wartime

"King Cotton" failed the South as a tool of wartime diplomacy partly because

A) Britain held large surpluses of cotton when the war began.
B) the British elite had long resented the aristocratic pretensions of southern planters.
C) poor harvests over the late 1850s and early 1860s drastically reduced the South´s cotton production.
D) Britain developed alternative supplies of cotton in South Africa and Australia.
E) the cotton crop was devastated by the boll weevil.