The part you are missing about the men using buck and ball rounds is this - they indeed did not receive the training for aimed fire either but with more lead in the air their rounds, moving at flatter trajectories, could hit targets.

At Antietam, the smoothbore for both sides out numbered the rifles on both sides. If they all fired buck and ball rounds I don't know, but this still remains America's bloodiest day. You did not need a rifle musket to kill and wound thousands of men. The Napoleonic Wars battles from 1809 onward prove that and all sides had smoothbores back then (save for some German jaeger units and a few British rifle regiments). Gettysburg's casualties for three days is about 53,000 men; Waterloo had 48,000 in one day. Borodino had 80,000 men in one day. Leipzig in 1813 remains the bloodiest battle of the 19th Century in addition to being the largest.

I fail to see how a smoothbore would be harder to load with buck and ball than a rifle round would be in that weapon. We do know that smoothbores did not fowl nearly as badly as the rifles did. Rifles could be very hard to load with fowled barrels.

Greg Biggs