The other thing about bayonets, and I am not trying to hi-jack the thread here, is that their use and effectiveness has been grossly understated in the modern revisionist thinking about Civil War battlefield injuries. You know...the whole mythology about how bayonets were rarely used as weapons and mostly served as meat skewers for camp-kabobs and/or candlestick holders. The backing for this is generally the lack of medical records for bayonet wounds in field hospital records. I have always believed that the reason for that is not that they were not in use, but rather that those wounded by bayonets never made it to a field hospital for their injuries to be recorded. They bled out on the battlefield. Perhaps if burial details made records about cause of death, we would have found just how effective the bayonet still was in close quarter fighting as a weapon, even a weapon of last resort. Sam Watkins noted in his memoirs (Company Aytch) the following: "We expected to be ordered into action every moment and kept seesawing backward and forward, until I did not know which way the Yankees were or which way the Rebels. We would form line of battle, charge bayonets, and would raise a whoop and yell, expecting to be dashed against the Yankee lines."
To be sure, bayonets had a variety of alternate uses, however there are a great many period accounts of their use in battle.
Bringing the