...carefully examines casualty rates between War Between the States battles and many comparable previous smoothbore musket battles where similar line tactics were used and finds no significant difference.
His contention is that the extreme parabolic curve of the slow-moving Minie bullet was such that exact range estimation beyond what most men on either side commonly practiced would have been necessary, The ranges at which most guys were actually hit by bullets little exceeded that of the smoothbore musket era.
In fact he gives examples of some Union units who purposefully hung on to their smoothbore muskets well into the war, preferring buck and ball over the Minie.
On the Confederate side, General Patrick Cleburne, who had previous experience with Enfield rifle-musket in the British Army, actually instituted British-style marksmanship training among his Confederate troops to familiarize them with the quirks of the Minie system (and ironic that systematic marksmanship training appeared in England before it did here).
I shoot a flintlock quite often, and I know from experience that a well set-up flintlock is practically as reliable as a percussion mechanism for most casual civilian uses, where a flintlock stumbles badly is when you need to fire several rounds in a row, like at a battle reenactment.
So I suppose the perfection of a practical and reliable percussion cap by 1860 may have enabled those situations where a line of men, typically behind cover such as the Sunken Road, St Mary's Heights, the Bloody Angle, and on the Union Side at Franklin may have been able to pour out the sustained volume of fire that they did because no one had to stop to change or sharpen a flint, or to clear a pan or vent.
Other than that, while the smoothbore twelve-pounder was still the most common mobile field artillery (not for nothing called the "Napoleon"), rifled artillery like the Parrot guns were deployed.
How much difference the extra range and accuracy of rifled artillery pieces made in those campaigns I do not know.
Birdwatcher
"...if the gentlemen of Virginia shall send us a dozen of their sons, we would take great care in their education, instruct them in all we know, and make men of them." Canasatego 1744
