In 1862 Joseph E. Brown governor of Georgia, proposed issuing pikes to the State militia to compensate for the shortage of guns. Thousands were made and issued but not known to have been used in combat.
Sidearms
Small revolvers, derringers and pepper-box pocket pistols like the teat-fire cartridge Colt Baby Dragoon were often carried by enlisted men as a backup weapon for close quarters fighting. Single shot caplock pistols copied from the prewar French models were issued to the US Navy. These had brass barrels to prevent corrosion. Some Confederate cavalry units were equipped with single shot caplock or even flintlock pistols early in the war. Some pistols were of the military make and had been issued to the US Army but were obsolete by the time of the Civil War due to the introduction of revolvers.
Rifles
Early in the war the Confederates used civilian firearms including shotguns and hunting rifles like the Kentucky or Hawken due to the shortage of military weapons. The British officer Arthur Fremantle observed that revolvers and shotguns were the favored weapons of Confederate cavalry and mounted infantry during his 1863 visit to the South.
Grenades
The American Civil War belligerents did have crude hand grenades equipped with a plunger that would detonate upon impact. The Union relied on experimental Ketchum Grenades with a wooden tail to ensure the nose would strike the target and start the fuse. The Confederacy used spherical hand grenades that weighed about six pounds sometimes with a paper fuse. They also used Rains and Adams grenades which were similar to the Ketchum in appearance and firing mechanism.
Landmines
They were typically iron containers, loaded with gunpowder, a fuse and also a brass detonation cap. Some of these still activated landmines were recovered in Alabama in the 1960s. Landmines were an intimidating method of psychological warfare, but were viewed as unethical. Union General William T. Sherman also hated them and declared them as not warfare but murder. Confederate General James Longstreet banned their use for a time.
Rapid fire weapons
Similar weapons of the Union included the.58 caliber Agar gun also known as "coffee mill gun" which was similar to the Claxton machine gun. Like the Gatling I and II machine gun, the cartridges of Ager's invention were fed by a hand crank with a hopper on top and had a steel guard, and this is why some people believe that President Lincoln called it "the coffee grinder gun". Other infantry support weapons included the Billinghurst Requa Battery volley gun which had eight banks of cartridge chambers that were rotated into alignment behind the row of 25 barrels. Chief of Ordnance, General James Wolfe Ripley was against issuing repeating rifles and rapid fire weapons to the Union army as he believed it would waste ammunition. Nevertheless, several generals, including General Benjamin Butler and General Winfield Scott Hancock, purchased Gatling machine guns that were the logical outgrowth of the trends portrayed in the Ager machine gun and the Ripley machine gun. The Confederacy used the single barrel hand cranked Williams machine gun that was similar to the single barrel hand cranked Gorgas machine gun and the Vandenberg volley gun that was similar to the French De Reffye mitrailleuse and the Belgian Montigny mitrailleuse.
