But most southerners who lived through the blockade gave a different answer. “Already the blockade is beginning to shut [ammunition] out,” wrote Mary Boykin Chesnut on July 16, 1861. It was “a stockade which hems us in,” she added in March 1862. In July 1861 a Charleston merchant noted in his diary that the “blockade is still carried on and every article of consumption particularly in the way of groceries are getting very high.” Four months later he wrote: “Business perfectly prostrated everything enormously high salt selling at 15 and 20 cents a quart hardly any shoes to be had dry goods of
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