List of weapons in the American Civil War

There were a wide variety of weapons used during the American Civil War, especially in the early days as both the Union and Confederate armies struggled to arm their rapidly-expanding forces.

Efforts were made to ensure that troops had the best possible firearms available, including rearming with captured enemy weapons after a battle.

The Confederacy in particular suffered from a shortage of modern weapons, and by 1862 prominent military leaders like Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson advocated the manufacture and distribution of pikes as a stopgap measure.

Joseph E. Brown, governor of Georgia, was the strongest proponent of pikes and procured thousands of them for local state militia.

Early models had been muzzleloaders, but because of the difficulty reloading them on horseback, the majority during the war were breechloaders employing linen cartridges.

[15] However, since the South was incapable of producing the metallic cartridges necessary for their function, Confederate troopers were severely limited in their use of repeating firearms.

[2][14] As late as 1863, the British officer Arthur Lyon Fremantle observed Confederate cavalry in Texas armed with a wide variety of weapons: rifles, shotguns, carbines and revolvers.

Rifled muskets had a significantly longer range than the older smoothbore types, but their accuracy at these distances was limited: gunpowder created billowing clouds of obscuring smoke and the bullet's high trajectory required accurately estimating the distance to the target, a difficult proposition for an untrained shooter.

The combination of a bullet with several buckshot was devastating at short distance, but rifled firearms could not use them as they damaged the spiral groves.

[17] Although breechloading and repeating rifles were available as early as 1861, few were issued for reasons such as cost, technical complexity, and institutional resistance.

[1][2] One of the most famous examples of this was the Lightning Brigade, whose wealthy commander, Colonel John T. Wilder, purchased Spencer repeating rifles for the entire formation.

[18] Thousands of hand grenades were used by belligerents on both sides, although shortcomings in the weapons of the time kept them from seeing widespread use; primarily they were reserved for sieges or trench warfare.

Rains, who ran the Torpedo Bureau, pioneered the use of explosive devices on land, while Matthew Fontaine Maury was responsible for developing the first sea mines.

This was due in part to smoothbore artillery using fixed ammunition, with the projectile and charge bound together, while rifled pieces used semi-fixed rounds where these were loaded separately.

The Confederates meanwhile had to make do with a wider variety of field artillery and went so far as to melt down outdated pieces so they could be recast as newer models.

[29][30] While smoothbore siege artillery had been common previously, the superiority of rifled guns in destroying fortifications saw them dominate during the Civil War.

The Confederate Navy was heavily reliant on British imports for their naval artillery, although they managed to manufacture some domestic models, which were used both at sea and on land.

[32] Although naval artillery was primarily mounted on and intended to destroy ships, it could play a role in land battles of the Civil War, including being brought ashore as occurred during the Siege of Vicksburg.

[33] The 12-pounder Dahlgren in fact was designed to be used mounted on the bow of a small boat, then be transferred to a field carriage in a matter of minutes.