Shipping by land was slow, laborious, and prohibitively costly

From the excellent Perilous Fight by Stephen Budiansky, an account of the naval aspects of the War of 1812. Page 216.

But the tightening British stranglehold on the American coast was telling everywhere. Two ships of the line and two frigates loitered off Sandy Hook and Montauk Point, sealing off Decatur in New York with the United States and his refitted prize the Macedonian. At Norfolk, the Constellation was for the moment safely holed up behind a floating gun-ship battery of thirty-four guns, a hastily erected artillery emplacement on Craney Island at the mouth of the harbor, and a line of blockships that had been sunk in the channel off Lambert’s Point barring the entrance to the Elizabeth River; but the natural and artificial facts that made Norfolk hard for the British to get into made it equally hard for the Constellation to get out of, and ever escape to sea. The Constellation’s captain, Charles Stewart, reported to Jones that many residents of Norfolk had fled in anticipation of a British attack on the town, and that some of the local militia had deserted from an apprehension that they would be ordered to serve on the undermanned gunboats. Jones replied promising all assistance and authorizing a reasonable recruitment bounty to make up the deficiency of crews for the gunboats, but cautioning that defense everywhere against a superior force was impossible: “The presence of a powerful hostile squadron is naturally calculated to excite alarm, thus we have urgent calls from Maine to Georgia, each conceiving itself the particular object of attack.”

The blockade had almost completely shut down the coasting trade, forcing shipments to go by land and creating commercial gluts and shortages. Philadelphia was cut off from the lower Delaware, and Baltimore was completely isolated from the sea; flour from the mid-Atlantic states that sold for $10.50 a barrel before the war was now going for $18 in Boston and $6.50 in Baltimore, where fifty thousand barrels piled up in warehouses. Baltimore newspapers began facetiously listing the movement of wagons in the style of shipping news items, telling how many days they had been on their journeys and reporting “no enemy cruisers” sighted on the way, but the thin humor could not mask the grim reality that shipping by land was slow, laborious, and prohibitively costly. One item that was reported without any attempt at jocularity read “Four wagons loaded with dry goods passed to-day through Georgetown, South Carolina, for Charleston, forty-six days from Philadelphia."