The South knew there was an immediate need for arms and munitions. Some of those were simply confiscated from Federal arsenals . US Secretary of War John B Floyd sent more than 115,000 muskets and rifles into the South after John Brown's raid, and those were, as US Grant would later wryly note " on hand when treason wanted them" ( though it is not quite clear whether Floyd was intending to arm the south for secession).

Richmond already had some manufacturing, and some of this was turned to arms making. The day after Virginia seceded, in April 18, 1861, Federal troops moved as many arms as possible out of the Harper's Ferry Armory, tried to burn what they had to leave behind. But the tooling and machinery was still there when Virginia forces arrived, and that was sent south, some of it to Richmond, along with an armorer, James Burton. Under Burton, the long-closed Virginia Manufactory of Arms was opened up and renamed the Richmond Armory. Burton would oversee the conversion of thousands of old flintlock muckets to percussion, and the Armory would make perhaps 35,000 Confederate versions of US rifled muskets and around 10,000 carbines, until it was finally burned in 1865. Burton would assist a local businessman, C.S. Robinson, with setting up a factory to make copies of Sharps rifles. He would also help two others, Spiller & Burr, make revolvers. Richmond also had the Tredegar Iron Works. Employing several hundred workers, both enslaved and free, it would turn out to be the only facility capable of making cannon and heavy ordnance for the Confederacy.

Also receiving machinery and workers from Harper's Ferry was the arsenal in Fayetteville, NC. They would manage to make about 500 rifled muskets a month, along with other small arms and accoutrements, about the same output as the Richmond Armory.

There would be other private ventures. A maker of pistols in New Orleans, Arvin Gunnison, teamed up in Georgia with a manufacturer of cotton gins, Samuel Griswold, to make pistols. Griswold had already made some pikes, at the request of the Georgia governor, but with Gunnison's tooling they started to produce copies of the Colt Navy revolver under the name Griswold & Gunnison. In Nashville, Tennessee in 1861, a business making agricultural implements, Sharp & Hamilton, turned to making swords, the hilts bearing the name Nashville Plow Works.

However, these efforts were greatly hindered by lack of supplies. Griswold & Gunnison couldn't get steel for their pistols, and had to make them from iron and brass. There was also the problem of trying to make arms in a war zone, after the south quickly was invaded. The Nashville Plow Works had only been operating for a about a year when middle Tennessee came under Union control after the Battle of Donelson, and both Sharp and Hamilton were not only shut down but arrested for treason. Griswold's factory below Macon was the site of the first battle that commenced Sherman's March to the Sea. On that march, Sherman's army would also come across Spiller & Burr's factory. Spiller and Burr had moved it from Richmond to Georgia, thinking it would be safer there. Sherman would also manage to include the Fayetteville Arsenal on his southern tour, and his troops wrecked and burned it.

And if the South could convert its small number of factories to making arms, the North could convert far more, and did. The Springfield Armory added workers and contracted out to around 20 other companies to make the 1861 Rifled Musket. The Ames Company in Massachusetts would greatly expand its capacity for making cannon, William Brooks and Lucius Gibbs would set up a new company in New York City to make Gibb's new breech-loading carbines, and there would be far more new producers of not only arms but blankets, shoes, tents. The South would always be far, far behind the North in the numbers of manufacturers. And though the Gibbs Company of New York City would be burned during the New York draft riots, unlike Southern arms makers no Northern factories were ever really at risk of being destroyed by the opposing army, and their sources of supplies were never subject to blockade. The combined production of Spiller & Burr, Griswold & Gunnison and other Southern makers of pistols was somewhere under 7,000. The Colt factory alone, in Connecticut, would turn out more than 127,000. The total wartime production of muskets and carbines in the South was somewhere around 100,000. The total Northern production of the US Model 1861 Rifled Musket alone was around 1,000,000.