Short answers, pulled from the story.
President Lincoln proclaimed the Union blockade on the 19th of April 1861, targeting ports in South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas. The proclamation warned that vessels approaching blockaded ports would be captured and their cargoes treated as prizes of war.
The Union blockade reduced Confederate cotton exports by 95 percent, from 10 million bales in the three years before the war to just 500,000 bales during the blockade period. The collapse in cotton revenue devalued Confederate currency and severely damaged the Southern economy.
The Union commissioned around 500 ships over the course of the war. By war's end, the Union Navy had grown to 671 ships, making it the largest navy in the world. At the moment the blockade was proclaimed, the Navy had only three ships suitable for blockade duty.
The Union Navy wrecked or captured an estimated 1,500 ships that attempted to run the blockade. Some 1,100 were captured and another 300 destroyed. By the end of the war, captures reached 50 percent of all sortie attempts.
At least 600,000 arms were smuggled into the Confederacy by blockade runners, the majority of them British Pattern 1853 Enfield rifles. Some 330,000 entered through Gulf ports alone. Historians have estimated these shipments prolonged the war by up to two years and cost roughly 400,000 additional American lives.
The Union blockade caused Egyptian cotton exports to surge from 600,000 cantars in 1861 to 1.3 million cantars by 1863, as Britain and France sought new cotton sources. Nearly 93 percent of Egypt's tax revenue came from cotton during this period. When the blockade ended in 1865 and American cotton returned to world markets, Egypt's cotton boom collapsed, contributing to the country's bankruptcy in 1876.