AMERICAN CIVIL WAR: THE MYTH OF LONG-RANGE RIFLES

Steve Cole reports: 

Over 50 years ago I read my first history book on the US Civil War (also known as the War Between the States, the War of Southern Rebellion, or the War of Northern Aggression). It cited a point which was repeated in a hundred other Civil War history books: the stupid Civil War generals  used the tactics of the old short-range musket with the new long-range rifled musket with the result of horrendous casualties. (The invention of the Minie bullet allowed rifled muskets to be loaded and fired just as fast as non-rifled muskets. With rifling, the muskets were more accurate in the hands of troops trained to use this accuracy.)
    

This turns out not to be the case at all. Casualties in the American Civil War were really no worse than those in the Napoleonic Wars, the War of 1812, or the US invasion of Mexico in 1847, all of which used short-ranged unrifled muskets. This is revealed in some recent books written in the last decade.
    

The reality is that it took a lot of training to use the longer range of the new rifles, and that training never happened. The problem is gravity. If you think the enemy is 300 yards away and you elevate the rifle for that range, the bullet will fly in an arc, rising for some distance then steadily moving lower and lower until it hits the ground. A soldier at 270 yards will be struck in the forehead while one at 330 yards will be struck in the foot. (Either will do to put him out of action. Anything in between is good, too.) An enemy soldier at 265 yards or 335 yards will not be hit at all. This is based on one firing soldier who knows how to estimate the range and aim his rifle accordingly.
    

The reality is that Civil War soldiers rarely had target practice; most only fired their rifles for practice on one day with all other firing in combat. Estimating range and aiming properly for that range are both skills that must be acquired through training. Even with training, soldiers in combat tend to get sloppy. A battle line firing at an enemy 300 yards away may have soldiers elevating their weapons for anything from 150 to 450 yards, meaning that only about 15-20% of the bullets fired that far from the enemy will have any chance of hitting a soldier. (Half of bullets fired at even the right range will pass between individual soldiers in the enemy line.)
    

Without training, fire beyond 150 yards was mostly wasted. Civil War officers knew that, and historical records individual that over 90% of firing was within that range. This is not much beyond the 100-yard range of a smooth-bore musket. At that range the effect of gravity is minimal, and a mass volley is likely to score a lot of hits. (Sharpshooters with special rifles were often deadly accurate at 300 yards, but there were very few such troops, and they received a lot of expensive special training. They often used special weapons.)
    

The reality is that while the armies of the Civil War were largely amateurs with woefully inadequate training, the officers were not stupid people and the tactics used (while not always correct) mostly were the best for the time and technology.