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Students of the American Civil War, whose ranks are legion, have paid vigorous attention to the many facets of the Union blockade of the Southern Confederacy. Questions of its strategic and economic impact are frequently debated, as are the important problems of logistics and diplomacy. Relatively little attention, however, has been paid to the participants themselves. The men who served on the blockading ships of the U.S. Navy performed the most tedious, if not the most perilous, task of the war. This volume is about one of them: Comdr. John Bonnet Marchand, USN. In these edited selections from Marchand’s sea journals, I have tried to allow him to speak for himself in the hope of preserving the freshness of his own narrative. For the reader’s convenience, however, I have corrected Marchand’s spelling, punctuation, and occasionally his syntax. In some cases I have broken unmanageable sentences into smaller, more concise units, and, in the interest of clarity, I have paragraphed long entries. Rather than use sic, which has always distracted me in my own reading experience, I have either corrected the error myself or, when it appeared to be intentional, simply allowed it to stand without editorial comment. Abbreviations were spelled out. Lieut. Comdg. has been translated throughout as Lieutenant Commander even though that rank was not officially established until 16 July 1862.
