if you really believe that the rifle musket had a higher muzzle velocity than smoothbores then you are sadly mistaken.

From the book "The Bloody Crucible of Courage" by Brent Nosworthy, a noted Napoleonic historian who turned his sights on the Civil War analyzing weapons, doctrine, training and much more comes this table (found on Pages 33-34) which compares the muzzle velocities of several weapons. Major Mordecai, of the US Army, in the 1840s, measured the muzzle velocities of smoothbores of the era. The US Army, French Army and British Army in the 1850s all measured them for minie rifles as they were doing their various tests. Among those officers was Lt. Cadmus Wilcox, future CS general, who wrote a treatise on the rifle musket after the testing that showed that due to its SLOWER muzzle velocity, the round dropped at ratios of feet per yards down range. Nosworthy reports that the Springfield rifle of the Civil War's round would drop 14 feet at 300 yards, whereas the modern M-16 round drops only a foot at the same distance. This is due to superior powder of today than back then and the higher muzzle velocities of modern rifles. All of the nations that used rifles in the 1850s conducted these tests and all of them reported the same thing. Nosworthy cites all of the pertinent tests of the major armies of the day as well as Scientific American who also did their own tests.

The table:

British Brown Bess - smoothbore - muzzle velocity 1500 feet per second
Enfield rifle musket - rifled - muzzle velocity 1115 feet per second

Modern rifles are over 2000 feet per second (the M-16 being 3250) but as all trained soldiers will tell you (and I live in an Army town and know a lot of trained soldiers as well as combat veterans) that even today the rifle round flies in a parabolic curve although it is much flatter than the Civil War era thanks to improved powder. But unlike Civil War soldiers, modern soldiers are taught range estimation and backsight adjustments to compensate. Wilcox and others advocated this training in the 1850s but most seemed to ignore it.

As a comparison, all modern tank cannons are smoothbore as the rounds fly at a super-high muzzle velocity and a flatter trajectory than rifled tank gun rounds did. Tanks have to have flat trajectories and rifled bores did not give that to them. Talk to anyone who was a veteran of the M-60 series with the 105 MM rifled tank gun and the modern 125MM smoothbore gun of the M1 series and they greatly prefer the 120MM smoothbore guns for the speed of the round and flatter trajectory.

Nosworthy cites British Army captain Andrew Steinmetz (Page 53), a proponent of the smoothbore for the ranges from 200 yards or less, "In fact, the trajectory of the smoothbore, at short distances, was flat; the ball met a man who happened to be in the line of fire: the trajectory of the rifle, owing to the DIMINISHED VELOCITY (emphasis mine) of the bullet by friction, can never be flat. If we could make the bullet spin without the loss of force by friction, of course the case would be altered; but that is impossible."

This is all simple laws of physics stuff. It was, of course, overcome to some degree thanks to improved powder which greatly increased the muzzle velocity of rifled bullets but that was not the case in the mid-19th Century. Nosworthy concludes this section with, "The discrepancy in performance between smoothbore and rifled weapons, as we have seen, stemmed from the difference in initial muzzle velocities."

Thus, since Griffith (and Nosworthy among others) have shown that most Civil War combat was between 80 and 120 yards, where the rifle did not do as well due to poorly trained troops and the parabolic curves of their bullets, that the flat trajectory smoothbores did just fine. Hess cites a number of Union units in his book ("The Rifle Musket in Civil War Combat: Myth and Reality") that preferred smoothbores over rifles and used them until the end of the war. Hess also covers the treatises and manuals written before the Civil War by US Army officers (some copying the British findings) that urged proper training of troops to handle the lower muzzle velocity of rifles and thus their parabolic curves. A post-war study by a US Army general (Stephen Benet) showed that none of these ideas were ever implemented, and, indeed, the drill manuals of the time do not reflect any training for range estimation, sight adjustments and aimed fire.

I have never disputed your point that a lot more rifle rounds were ordered by the Union Army - same for the Confederates based on the ordnance returns I have found in CS Staff Officers and the CSRs at the National Archives. But I know that a lot of smoothbores were still in use in 1864, especially Confederates, as I have seen the returns for buck and ball and .69 caliber rounds.

Friends of mine who have shot all types of muskets at NSSA events and on their own have told me that buck and ball rounds load easier than older rifle styles (with the patched balls) and just as easy as minie rounds do. They came prepackaged like other ball rounds and minie rounds did from the ordnance works. I have seen a few examples at Civil War shows. A British officer writing before the Civil War, cited by Nosworthy, hoped the new minie rounds would load as easily as smoothbore rounds did. Much of that is, as I have stated based on what my NSSA friends have told me from their experience, was the fact that the smoothbores fouled a lot less than rifles do because there's no grooves for the powder to build up in on smoothbores.

So why did the armies of the day buy into the rifles? New technology. New technology, throughout human history, being the shiny new thing, always gets lauded and used often before it is truly understood. History shows that new technology often creates far more problems than it solves. But the human race is smitten with all things "new." The rifle musket is just another of those types of technology created to solve a problem on the battlefield - how to kill the enemy at further distances (this coming from the French experience in their Algerian war of the 1840s). So they invented rifled muskets and the bullets for them. But it took another decade before these new weapons were tested and their abilities and limitations found and heavily documented. Thus troops that could swap crappy Belgian muskets for new rifles in the Civil War did so much more so because they were "new" and had been told that they could kill at longer ranges - without being told that they would not be trained to use them properly to make that happen. So the vast majority of the rounds they would fire from this new weapon would simply miss their targets.

Suggestions to improve their effectiveness - largely by training the troops in these discoveries - were offered and ignored. Imagine how much bloodier the Civil War would have been had the troops of both sides been so trained? Even that could have been overcome by infantry tactical changes as the French did with their Zouave drills, which advanced troops across the killing zones at a much faster rate than before. They basically moved at a trot. Nosworthy tells of the war between France and Austria prior to the Civil War, where both sides had rifled muskets but casualties were not that high. For the French this had to do with their "Zoauve rush" tactics. Hardee's manual, a carbon copy of French manuals, advocated a faster rate of advance than earlier American drill manuals like Scott's, as a way to solve the increased ranges of the rifles. Nosworthy compares rates of fire to rates of advance and shows that if you could keep the troops moving forward at a certain pace you could cross that killing zone much faster and with lower losses. It was the natural inclination to stop and return fire where the problems came in - and the casualties went up no matter if you attacked rifle or smoothbore equipped enemy troops. My combat veteran pals of today tell me that the Army strives to teach and use fire and movement for this reason as do the Marines.

Therefore, the Civil War would have probably been just as bloody as it was had both armies stayed with smoothbores the entire time - just as the Napoleonic Wars were incredibly bloody and all armies of that era had smoothbores with flintlock ignition systems. Percussion cap smoothbores were much more effective and faster loading than flintlocks were. American armies would still use the same Napoleonic linear tactics and march towards each other blazing away at the same combat ranges that Napoleon and his contemporaries used (for the most part) and they would often fail to press home attacks preferring to stop and return fire - which is the real reason that the casualties were so high in the first place.

Hess correctly points out that the rifle musket was not used as a war weapon for that long before being replaced by better weapons - breech loaders and repeaters. Smoothbore muskets were used for far longer. Increasing rates of fire and putting more lead downrange created a whole new set of problems for modern armies to deal with - how to get troops moving even faster in the kill zones. As the Civil War was being fought, the Prussians and French were converting to armies equipped entirely with breech loading rifles and breech loading artillery, which made the future battlefields even deadlier. Both adapted their infantry tactics into looser formations to cope but the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 was still a slaughter due to much higher rates of fire.

There really isn't much more that can be discussed here until you have read Paddy Griffith's "Battle Tactics of the American Civil War" (he is a lecturer at Sandhurst, Britain's West Point, and a noted military historian); Earl Hess' book cited above or Brent Nosworthy's book, which I argue is the most important Civil War book of the last 15 years for all that it brings to the table in terms of discussion of weapons, doctrine, application, experience and so much more. I know about ordnance returns of the Civil War quite well as well as the things written at the time for rifle musket advocates. But the analysis of these three historians, using period sources, has taken almost all of the wind out of the rifle musket's sails as the cause of the high casualties of the Civil War. It had far more to do with poor training and poor infantry doctrine. Some officers of the war figured out how to compensate for that, like Emory Upton, but far more failed to do so.

Greg Biggs