Thank you! What great replies. It makes sense to me now and I cannot argue with Thomas Aagaard and Saphroneth. I hunted growing up and I never took a shot at game unless it was 20 meters or less. A 100 yard shot was out of the question, a waste on ammo. I used to pick up bottles off the roads and turn them in the to country store. then buy a box of .22LR. I digress but I consider this "The Meat" of history studies.
I think this is probably the disconnect, yes. It's because the idea of hunting producing a good shot is well ingrained, but hunting doesn't really teach you long range battlefield musketry because if you're hunting for meat you're not trying to do it at as long a range as possible - because deer don't shoot
back.
As it may help to explain a bit more about the nature of musketry, here's some info about how firearms of the period perform.
All weapons have a point-blank range, and this is a lot longer than it sounds. Point-blank is the distance over which a firearm can hit a target by just being pointed directly at it, without the need to compensate for bullet drop (or other similar factors), and while we're used to the idea of a smoothbore musket being an inaccurate weapon that's only a relative thing. A late 18th/early 19th century smoothbore musket would have a point-blank range of around 80-100 yards, depending on whether you count the flash of the flintlock igniting the pan as reducing point-blank range or just making it harder to point it directly at the target in the first place.
This doesn't mean "every shot would hit". It means that a perfectly aimed smoothbore musket at 80-100 yards is very likely to hit the target.
Beyond that range, a smoothbore musket becomes increasingly likely to miss. There are several factors causing those misses, including the way that the ball's trajectory out of the muzzle is slightly randomized (it "bounces" down the barrel) and the Magnus effect (which causes the ball to "fly off target" owing to the randomized spin that it has - think like how a fast bowler can put a spin on a ball to make it curve), but these don't mean a shot goes completely wild. There are examples in the Napoleonic wars of troops giving productive (if inaccurate) fire with smoothbore muskets at 200-300 yards at area targets - sort of like artillery bombardment, you're not aiming for Joe Bloggs but you're aiming for the regiment he's in and you don't care if you hit Bill Smith next to him instead, and since you're doing it as a "bombardment" you don't care much if most of the balls fly wild so long as some of them hit.
As a point of curiosity, though, it can be argued that if you're firing at 200-300 yards with a smoothbore musket but not allowing for bullet drop then you might get the occasional hit from bullets that
go high and so counteract the bullet drop itself.
The rifle improves things firstly by making the ball's trajectory down the barrel consistent (so the "cone of fire" is smaller at a given range) and secondly by imparting a gyroscopic and
predictable spin to the ball. This means that over ranges of 300-800 yards (or more depending on the parameters of the rifle) you can predict the ball's trajectory to a sufficient degree of accuracy that bullet drop becomes the primary factor affecting it.
At that point, you can train your whole army in range estimation, and it'll make them accurate over longer ranges.
An interesting thing that comes out of this is that if your army is engaging at 100 yards or thereabouts anyway (like most Civil War firefights) going from smoothbore muskets to rifle-muskets
is, if anything, a downgrade. Going from a smoothbore to a rifle at that range does not make your shots more likely to hit (because at that range if you were pointing the weapon directly at the target is a hit no matter what weapon you're using) and rifle-muskets were slower loading than smoothbore muskets along with having less bullet energy.
(The effect on the morale of the army is not included here.)