ORIGINAL: Fidel_Helms
No doubt. However, the reverse happened much more frequently, by virtue of the North being in possession of the vast majority of the capacity to make these weapons in the first place. That the South had these guns to capture in the first place is a consequence of the guns being taken from Federal arsenals upon secession or after battles. In particular, some 36,000 rifles were recovered during the Seven Days.
I'm really tiring of responding to this pop history view of the Civil War. Do you seriously think that the federal government had massive(30,000+) stocks of British rifles sitting around before the war? Again, totally laughable.
No, neither side had large stocks of rifles available. Each side ended up buying a similar number of rifles from oversea sources like Britain. The difference ended up being that Northern domestic production of rifles far outpaced what the Confederacy attained from their crash firearm production effort.