Trying to understand the rifled musket's real impact on the American Civil War.

by unwholesome

For a layperson like me, "common knowledge" about the American Civil War is that the rifled musket changed the face of warfare almost overnight. Commanders steeped in Napoleonic tactics sent their troops against defenders as if they were all armed with smoothbore muskets accurate at about 50 yards. But with rifled muskets and the fast-loading minie ball, each defender became a sniper, mercilessly picking off targets from hundreds of yards away. At least, that's what I've always believed.

But how true is that?

I've heard challenges to the traditional ideas about rifled muskets before, though I don't recall the source. If I recall correctly, it went something like: in the age of black powder, having an accurate rifle wasn't that advantageous if your enemy was concealed under a thick cloud of smoke, not to mention the smoke from your own unit.* Couple that with the very real possibility that many soldiers weren't "shooting to kill" (as Grossman later observed), and I think it's worth asking whether the high casualties of the war can really be attributed to the minie ball.

Were the casualty rates of the Civil War any higher than those of previous wars? The numbers certainly were, but that could be because improved logistics meant more men could be brought to the front. So you could have bigger armies with bigger casualties, without the battles necessarily being "bloodier" in a proportional sense. Knowing the casualty rates might help answer this question.

Building off that, were officer casualty rates higher? I seem to remember this being the case but again I can't remember a source. If so, then it could be that even if most soldiers weren't shooting to kill, the few "true killers" might have been better able to pick out individual targets, like the guy with the shiny brass and the sword.

Anyway, thanks for your time!

Yeangster

I asked a question in the same vein a few months back and got this excellent response by /u/white_light-king

Centurian52

I spent hours creating a fairly lengthy response yesterday before my computer unexpectedly restarted and all of my effort was lost. I will attempt to recreate my work, but I have little hope it will measure up to what I wrote yesterday. I feel like I am obliged to add that I am not a historian, merely an enthusiast, but I will do the best I can.

At this point I have come to the conclusion that rifled muskets would not have made much of a difference from smoothbore muskets in a pitched battle (although I have gone back and forth on this point several times already, and may do so again in the future if I find more information), which is not to say that they made no difference at all. First of all, smoothbore muskets are far more effective weapons than modern popular opinion would lead one to believe. Second, while rifled muskets are undoubtedly superior weapons there are several battlefield factors which mask that superiority most of the time.

Let's start with some basic numbers. The point-target effective range (the distance at which a single marksman can be expected to hit a single target) of a typical smoothbore musket is usually given as about 75 yards (68.58 meters). That isn't great by modern standards, but ask a friend to stand 75 yards away (about 3/4 of a football field) and you'll see that smoothbores weren't so wildly inaccurate as popular opinion suggests. The "battle range" (roughly analogous to area-target effective range, which is the distance at which a large volume of fire can be expected to put rounds inside an enemy formation) of a typical smoothbore musket is usually given as about 200 yards (182.88 meters). A more modern measure of accuracy is MOA (minutes of angle, 1 MOA is the same as an arcminute or 1/60th of a degree). Modern test firings (so I'm told, I don't have the original source so take this with a grain of salt) put the accuracy of smoothbore muskets at between 24 MOA and 36 MOA depending on the model (for reference the angular size of the full moon as viewed from Earth averages about 31 MOA). The Charleville musket managed about 36 MOA, the Brown Bess 30 MOA, and the model 1842 Springfield smoothbore achieved about 24 MOA (these numbers are suspiciously evenly spaced, which is another reason I wish I had the original source).

And now for those same numbers for rifled muskets. The point-target effective range for a rifled-musket is somewhere around 200 yards (182.88 meters) and the battle range (or at the very least the range that seems to keep coming up as the assumed range that fire is opened at) is around 500 yards (457.2 meters). Modern test firings put the accuracy of a rifled-musket between about 7.5 MOA and 10.5 MOA (for the rifles I know about anyway) with the model 1861 Springfield rifle achieving about 10.5 MOA and the P53 Enfield achieving around 7.5 MOA (again, a grain of salt is recommended). For reference, modern military rifles tend to average around 2-4 MOA.

In 1860 a comparative firing test was conducted between the model 1861 Springfield rifled musket at the "Smoothbore Musket, calibre .69", which was probably the model 1842 Springfield smoothbore, but might have been the model 1816. Both weapons were fired at 100, 200, and 300 yards (91.44, 182.88, and 274.32 meters) at a 10 foot (3.05 meter) by 10 foot target, with 50 shots each time. At 100 yards the rifled musket hit 96% to 100% of the time, and the smoothbore hit 74% to 86% of the time. At 200 yards the rifle hit 64% to 82% of the time, and the smoothbore hit 36% to 48%. Finally, at 300 yards the rifle hit 46% to 58% of its shots, with the smoothbore hitting 18% or less in all trials. From this test we see that at 100 yards the rifle was about 1.1 to 1.3 times more likely to hit than the smoothbore, at 200 yards it is about twice as likely to hit, and at 300 yards it is about three times as likely to hit.

Here are some figures lifted directly from the website: Napoleon, His Army and Enemies (link at the bottom of the next comment due to character limit).

  • - In 1755 two companies of Prussian grenadiers fired at a target 10 paces broad and 10 feet high. At 300 paces they scored approx. 12.5 % hits and at 150 paces 46 %.
  • - In another test out of 720 French infantry, 52 hit the target of 3m x 100 m. At 200 m there were only 18 hits.
  • - At 160 and 320 yards out of 200 rounds fired at a large target, approximating the size of a formed infantry company, the following number of hits was obtained (Nafziger's "Imperial Bayonets" published by Greenhill Books 1996) : ------------------------------------160 yards---320 yards
    • Old Prussian 1782 musket----64-------------42
    • New Prussian 1809 musket--113------------42
    • British musket--------------------116------------55
    • French musket 1777------------99 -------------55

So far all of these figures have been for either the accuracy of the weapons themselves or for the accuracy of calm marksmen under peaceful conditions. But it is pretty well known that accuracy drops dramatically on a battlefield. There are several reasons for this, most of them having to do with the shooter and not the weapon.

  1. Many soldiers may have had an aversion to killing other human beings and may have missed intensionally (or fired to frighten rather than to kill).
  2. Repeated volleys would leave a thick cloud of smoke, making it very difficult to see or aim at the enemy formation.
  3. Line infantry (as opposed to skirmishers) were never trained to be good marksmen in the first place, and usually only fired a handful of rounds per year in practice.
  4. Emphasis on loading and firing quickly reduces emphasis on aiming.
  5. Stresses related to combat (loud noises, the sense of urgency presented by an approaching mass of enemy troops, a general apprehension and fear of death or injury) can make it very difficult to focus on achieving clean shots.
  6. The range of an enemy formation on a battlefield was often unknown (as opposed to a range which is clearly marked), and many shots would be leveled too high or too low.
  7. Nervous (or sometimes excited) troops would open fire without orders well beyond the effective range of their weapons (300, often 500 yards or beyond).

All but the last of these (since rifles have a much longer effective range) would have applied equally to both smoothbore muskets and rifled muskets. In the Napoleonic wars the number of rounds fired to inflict one casualty was probably somewhere from 200-500. I estimated about 150 rounds fired at Gettysburg for every casualty inflicted, a figure reached by dividing the 7 million rounds expended by the 46,000-51,000 casualties of the battle (this does not account for casualties inflicted by artillery nor does it subtract captured/missing from the total casualties).