One of my absolute favorite "myth-busting" books is Earl J. Hess' study:
Oh, absolutely, the rifle's value in Civil War combat has been vastly overstated.
Based on statistical analysis of engagements in the Civil War the possession of a rifle versus a musket on the part of either side is not statistically significant; the
weather is statistically significant, which means that if Jonny Reb has a smoothbore and Billy Yank has a rifle then Jonny shouldn't be unduly worried - and if the weather's too hot (IIRC it's that way around) then Billy is the one who should be careful.
This is basically because of the training issue. To use even a smoothbore musket to the limits of the ability of the firearm is a matter of training, and that training was never given in any kind of systematized way in at least the Union army (where we have data indicating that thousands of the men of 5th Corps as of late 1864 had never so much as practice-fired their muskets once); a rifle-musket has a much higher ceiling of effectiveness than a smoothbore, but if you use it like a smoothbore you get smoothbore performance out of it.
If you're familiar with Napoleonic combat, and with pre-Napoleonic combat, and you look at the Civil War, what you mostly see is pre-Napoelonic combat (lines of infantry, broad-front advances, comparatively little interarms cooperation) with occasional flashes of Napoleonic battle methods like Upton; the tactics are somewhat better and see some attempts at manoeuvre sur les derriere or the break-through the centre but the articulation of the forces is poor.
This is not a slight on the men of the armies (who were never trained in the Napoleonic or post-Napoleonic battle techniques) or indeed the officers (who were too busy trying to work out how to run a six-figure army size from a standing start), but the idea that the Civil War is the war which prefigures modern combat is certainly not the case - if anything it's a throwback, though by no means is this the case in all respects.
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