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The blockade was a source of acute discomfort to the Southern people, cutting them off from most luxuries and many necessaries. Salt, coffee, tea, soap, candles, matches, glue advanced enormously in price and were extremely scarce. The blockade taught lessons of economy, causing highly bred young women of Charleston to dress in homespun and Richmond gentlemen to wear last year’s clothes. Brooms, chairs, baskets, brushes, pails, tubs, kegs, slate pencils and knitting needles were scarce. Ink began to be made in the home by a crude process. In the news columns of the Charleston Courier, it was announced that a man in Caswell County (N. C.) was manufacturing writing ink which he would furnish in any quantity to those who would provide their own bottles. A Richmond apothecary advertised that he could not fill prescriptions unless persons requiring medicines should bring their own phials. But many common medicines were hard to get. The medical purveyor at Richmond appealed to the ladies of Virginia to cultivate the poppy so that opium might be had for the sick and wounded of the army. Various things were popularly suggested to take the place of quinine and other medicines. The surgeon-general sent out officially a formula for a compound tincture of dried dogwood, poplar and willow bark and whiskey “to be issued as a tonic and febrifuge and substitute as far as practicable for quinine.” Quinine and morphia were articles greatly desired in the trade with the North. All possible means were used to obtain these and other drugs and a large amount of smuggling was at one time carried on from Cincinnati by men and women devoted to the Confederate cause. In October, 1862, when General Sherman was in command at Memphis, an imposing funeral headed by a handsome city hearse, with pall and plumes, was allowed by the guards to pass

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