The Afterlives of Guns from the US Civil War

The U.S. Civil War left behind an enormous number of firearms in the United States. Between imports and vast increases in domestic arms production, more than a million modern rifles poured into North America between 1861-1865, equipping the war’s carnage and the destruction of legal slavery in the U.S. At war’s end, the federal government auctioned off hundreds of thousands of decommissioned guns to a small number of wholesalers. These wholesalers cleaned them up and resold them at home and abroad. My paper will explain how the afterlives of Civil War guns shaped the landscape of war and disarmament at home and abroad. Domestically, Civil-War guns had significant consequences for relations of power in the postbellum South and West. In the former Confederate States of America, federal troops engineered Reconstruction in part by disarming ex-members of the CSA and arming freedmen. This dynamic reversed with the collapse of Reconstruction and the triumph of white terror. Castoffs from the Civil War also armed the postbellum colonization of the trans-Mississippi West and the rapid subjugation and disarmament of its Indigenous polities. Finally, the Civil War made the U.S. one of the world’s most important arms exporters. Using trade data from several countries, I’ll explain how U.S. arms equipped transformational conflicts in Europe, Asia, and Latin America in the generation after the Civil War.