Muzzleldrs Smoothbore Springfields in Union Regiments in 1864?

[Rhea Cole]

First of all there are cases of units sticking with their smoothbores.
Also, Iam arguing that they are better in the hands of men who are poorly trained in marksmanship. If the men can hit a line at 200 yards, then the rifled firearm is better.

And how often do you find soldiers who openly admit that they are poorly trained?
It require a basic understanding of ballistics and marksmanship to know that you are poor at it. Something you would not have, with no training.

Another factor it the age and quality of the arms. Many of the smoothbores where old and used guns.
Most people would take a new gun over an old one.

Also, there is absolutely no guaranty that the veterans knows best. Just watch interviews with wwii veterans and the amount of myths and errors they tell. (like how it took 5 Shermans to kill a Tiger? There where 5 Sherman in a platoon. So you would never send anything less. If the platoon was at full strength... and the US was very good at keeping the tank units at close to full strength. And the number of times a Sherman actually engaged a Tiger was very limited.)

The most direct answer to your question does not come from Normandy in 1944. Claud E. Fuller's book The Rifled Musket has the results of head to head tests done with 18 Civil War long guns including smoothbore muskets loaded with ball & buck & ball, rifled smoothbore muskets, rifled muskets, breach loading carbines & "Smooth bore musket, calibre .69, with Morse's breach loading". The weapons were fired by ordinary soldiers, generally ten men at a time. They fired at ranges from 100 to 500 yards. The targets were paper & the hits are reproduced in the original reports reproduced in the book. The book also has just about everything anybody would ever want to know about Civil War long arms.

At 100 yards, Cal .69 musket loaded with a ball & three buck shot firing 50 shots, the ball hit 35 times, about twice that many buckshot hit the target. The same musket loaded with ball only had about the same number as the ball hits.

At 200 yards, 22 balls & 23 buckshot hit the target. Most of the buckshot did not penetrate the paper of the target. At 300 yards, beyond the range of the buck & ball, a .58 Cal rifled musket scored 26 hits.

It is worth noting that at 100 yards, the ball only, buck & ball hits are scattered all over the target, the rifled musket hits are in a tight cluster indicating that the riflemen could hit what they aimed at.

I often stand at the Chicago Board of Trade Battery's position at Stones River. I am gazing over the 800 yards of open cotton field that separates me from the tree line where the Raines' infantry charged George Thomas' line. Seven hundred yards, seven hundred steps before a musket loaded with buck & ball would become effective. Seven hundred yards with at fixed bayonet... might as well be Macadonian pikemen. The Pioneer Corps, guarding the battery's flanks engaged them hundreds of yards before they could fire a shot. Coupled with the battery's fire, they were shot to tatters without a chance to fire an effective shot. That's what I think about when someone tells me how they would have preferred buck & ball to a rifle.

 

[Rhea Cole]

Lots and lots of people. Certainly there are several instances of regiments passing up the chance to re-equip with rifles.

If lots of people in the early war started with smoothbores (which is true, we know this) and some fraction of them declined to re-equip with rifles (also true - Irish Brigade, Texas Brigade) then the people in those regiments would be actively preferring the smoothbore over the rifle.



Now, as to the actual properties of the weapon. Here's the thing - at the usual firefight range of the Civil War (which was about 100 yards averaged over the whole war) the smoothbore is actually not a very inferior weapon. A perfectly aimed M1842 musket will hit a torso (2 foot target) 100% of the time at 150 yards, and what that means is that in most Civil War firefights the limiting factor on the performance of the weapon is the performance of the man, not the performance of the long arm - if you aim perfectly you will hit whether you have a rifle or a smoothbore. At that range the heavier bullet of the smoothbore does more damage and is thus a superior weapon, while buck-and-ball gives chances for light wounds where a rifle would have scored no wound (and is thus also superior).

At longer range, the rifles become superior - and the Enfield becomes superior to the Springfield.


The next question is - how could a veteran judge the quality of his weapon? How can he tell if he needs the greater range accuracy of the rifle over the smoothbore?
The answer is that he has no way to tell. With typical ACW hit rates (about 0.5% per round) it's quite possible for a Union soldier to have fought at Antietam, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg and the Wilderness without ever having hit a man - and because he's firing as part of volley fire, he has no way to tell that, or indeed if he's hit more than a dozen people.
The only way to determine how good you are with a long ranged weapon is to do practice with it, which is to say to train with it. But the Union pretty much never practiced firing, and indeed in November 1864 Warren reported that his command (5th Corps) contained nearly four thousand men who had never so much as fired a musket:

The War of the Rebellion: a compilation of the official records of the Union and Confederate armies. Pub. under the direction of the ... Secretary of War. ... ser.1, v.42, pt.1.

'The command... consisted, first, of the First Division... 4,707 strong, of which 1,247 were ignorant of the manual, and 2,803 had never fired off a musket. Second, of the Second Division... 4,704 strong, of which 104 were ignorant of the manual, and 812 had never fired off a musket. Third, of two brigades of the Third Division... of which 298 were ignorant of the manual and 298 had never fired off a musket.'

The only way these men have to judge whether a weapon is good or bad is how modern or "cool" it is, and a weapon from 1863 is clearly more modern and "cool" than a weapon from 1842. But that's all they have to go on.

Caud E. Fuller's book The Rifled Musket contains answers to just about any question you might have about Civil War long guns. The men didn't make judgements on their armaments, the men who ordered the report reproduced in Fuller's book did. An exception to that rule was John Wilder's brigade who purchased Spencer Repeating Rifles with their own money.

 

[Saphroneth]

Caud E. Fuller's book The Rifled Musket contains answers to just about any question you might have about Civil War long guns. The men didn't make judgements on their armaments, the men who ordered the report reproduced in Fuller's book did.

But you literally just today said:

That settles the question for me; after all, who knows better than C.W. veterans?

Now you're saying that the opinion of the C.W. Veterans which you cited actually doesn't matter.

Claud E. Fuller's book The Rifled Musket has the results of head to head tests done with 18 Civil War long guns including smoothbore muskets loaded with ball & buck & ball, rifled smoothbore muskets, rifled muskets, breach loading carbines & "Smooth bore musket, calibre .69, with Morse's breach loading". The weapons were fired by ordinary soldiers, generally ten men at a time. They fired at ranges from 100 to 500 yards. The targets were paper & the hits are reproduced in the original reports reproduced in the book. The book also has just about everything anybody would ever want to know about Civil War long arms.

At 100 yards, Cal .69 musket loaded with a ball & three buck shot firing 50 shots, the ball hit 35 times, about twice that many buckshot hit the target. The same musket loaded with ball only had about the same number as the ball hits.

At 200 yards, 22 balls & 23 buckshot hit the target. Most of the buckshot did not penetrate the paper of the target. At 300 yards, beyond the range of the buck & ball, a .58 Cal rifled musket scored 26 hits.

It is worth noting that at 100 yards, the ball only, buck & ball hits are scattered all over the target, the rifled musket hits are in a tight cluster indicating that the riflemen could hit what they aimed at.

First question. Were the men who did this at any point trained in musketry? Because if they were in fact trained in musketry then they were not ordinary soldiers - they were extraordinary soldiers by the standards of the Civil War, because musketry training was extremely rare for the armies of the Civil War.

I often stand at the Chicago Board of Trade Battery's position at Stones River. I am gazing over the 800 yards of open cotton field that separates me from the tree line where the Raines' infantry charged George Thomas' line. Seven hundred yards, seven hundred steps before a musket loaded with buck & ball would become effective. Seven hundred yards with at fixed bayonet... might as well be Macadonian pikemen. The Pioneer Corps, guarding the battery's flanks engaged them hundreds of yards before they could fire a shot. Coupled with the battery's fire, they were shot to tatters without a chance to fire an effective shot. That's what I think about when someone tells me how they would have preferred buck & ball to a rifle.

It's arguably more than seven hundred yards, because the average firefight range in the Civil War was about a hundred yards and at that range about 0.5% of rounds hit the target - whether fired by smoothbore muskets or by rifles. The usual definition of effective range is the range at which 20% of perfectly aimed shots fired hit the target, so it doesn't take training into account, but as it happens we know from an ad-hoc experiment that when forty soldiers discharged their firearms at the broad side of a barn from a hundred yards away they scored only one hit within the height of a line of infantrymen. It would be reasonable to determine from this that the definitional effective range would be less than 100 yards - whether with rifles or muskets.



"There does appear to have been a serious lack of target practice in the armies of both sides, and we find that when it did occur most diarists regarded it as a highly exceptional event." Paddy Griffith, Battle Tactics of the American Civil War, p. 87
24th Michigan: "It was sent to the front within a very few weeks of its formation in July 1862, and in its only recorded target practice during that time three men were wounded and one died of a heart attack… the regiment's next target practice came some four months later… After this we learn of a resumption over a year later" Paddy Griffith, Battle Tactics of the American Civil War, pp. 87-8
13th Massachusetts "held its first target practice… only in the spring of 1864" Paddy Griffith, Battle Tactics of the American Civil War, p. 88
"35th Massachusetts in 1862, despite being armed with Enfields considered that 300 yards was out of range of the enemy" Paddy Griffith, Battle Tactics of the American Civil War, p. 88
5th Connecticut: "About a hundred yards away, the broad side of a barn proved to be too much of a temptation. The men fired a volley at the harmless foe. The men were sadly disappointed when they checked the results of their seemingly fearsome fire. Only four bullets [of forty] had found their way to the building, though it was 20 feet long and 15 feet wide. Of these, only a single bullet hole was within the height of a line of infantrymen." Brent Nosworthy, The Bloody Crucible of Courage: Fighting Methods and Combat Experience of the American Civil War (London: Constable, 2005), p. 145
"There is little in the literature to suggest that the average Civil War infantry regiment even began to judge distances or set sights accurately for battle. On the contrary, there are many references to officers telling their men simply to aim low" Paddy Griffith, Battle Tactics of the American Civil War, p. 88
"At Drewey's Bluff, Virginia (May 13, 1864), I. Hermann, a Confederate infantryman, noticed the execution Union bullets were inflicting on a tall pine just within the rebel breastworks. Though the two firing lines had been only a hundred yards apart, Hermann noticed bark, needles and cones being knocked down the entire height of the tree down to the top of the breastworks. Hermann concluded that even though thousands of shots were fired in a high parabolic trajectory into the upper regions of the tree, thousands more were fired even higher and escaped any sort of visual detection." Brent Nosworthy, The Bloody Crucible of Courage, p. 581

 

[thomas aagaard]

They fired at ranges from 100 to 500 yards.

You are completely missing the central issue. No one is questioning the fact that a rifle musket is more accurate as a firearm.
Hitting a target the size of an infantry line at 100yards should be doable for most people with little training.
(on a peaceful firing range that is)
And with some training the same is the case at 300 yards.

What make long range firing a lot harder with rifle muskets compered to modern firearms is the fact that you need to judge the range very precisely.
Imaging if they told the solders that the target was at 300 yards, but had actually placed it at 250. Then a lot of them would have most likely overshot the target. (especially if the target was the actual height of an average man and not 6 feet as they often where),
The estimation issue is removed when doing tests like this.

And correctly judging if a man is 250 or 275 yards away is rather hard. And when firing up or down, as was not uncommon, the whole issue become a lot harder. Then add the chaos of combat.

And btw you own numbers show why smoothbores are more effective at 100yards.
With 50 shots fired they made about 100 hits. Something that obviously can't be done with a rifle musket firing a single "minié" bullet

 

[Saphroneth]

You are completely missing the central issue. No one is questioning the fact that a rifle musket is more accurate as a firearm.

Indeed. The issue is not "is a rifle better than a musket for a skilled soldier" but "were Civil War soldiers skilled enough to gain any significant benefit from switching from muskets to rifles"?
With a secondary point of "If Civil War soldiers cannot gain the benefit of a rifle's increased range or accuracy, could they instead get benefit from the spread effect of the buck and ball?"

I often stand at the Chicago Board of Trade Battery's position at Stones River. I am gazing over the 800 yards of open cotton field that separates me from the tree line where the Raines' infantry charged George Thomas' line. Seven hundred yards, seven hundred steps before a musket loaded with buck & ball would become effective. Seven hundred yards with at fixed bayonet... might as well be Macadonian pikemen. The Pioneer Corps, guarding the battery's flanks engaged them hundreds of yards before they could fire a shot. Coupled with the battery's fire, they were shot to tatters without a chance to fire an effective shot. That's what I think about when someone tells me how they would have preferred buck & ball to a rifle.

Simple question. At what point did either side in this engagement - the infantry, not the artillery - actually open fire?
I certainly agree that advancing like this against trained riflemen would be an incredibly painful experience, but that's exactly the thing, because it doesn't seem to have been painful enough for Rains' infantry. It looks like they took enfilade fire from artillery, pressed to within a hundred yards, and stalled within firefight range before being pushed away by a counterattack.

 

[Robin Lesjovitch]

It might be noted that Jefferson Davis, as the CSA formed, saw to it that a small distinction in uniform was made between "rifleman" and "infantry man". The idea certainly goes back to the American War of Independence.
Although rifles did not become a separate service, some units did create special outfits to perform rifle duties.

 

[Saphroneth]

Although rifles did not become a separate service, some units did create special outfits to perform rifle duties.

This is not far off the old way of organizing British infantry battalions, actually. You'd have the eight line companies and the two flank companies, and the flank companies would be the ones to perform special duties like skirmishing or the like. (This predated the rifle in British service, IIRC - though the Baker was the first true multi purpose rifle and is probably the better comparator for the ACW rifle-muskets.)

Some of the equipment process done in the North at least was along these lines (a regiment would get smoothbores for eight companies and rifles for two), but it was never formalized to the extent that the flank companies actually got any training at it - which is a pity, really, because early in the Civil War each brigade having enough trained riflemen to form a rifle battalion and the rest of them being line infantry with smoothbores would have made good use of available weapons and significantly improved the efficiency of the whole army.

Of course at the same time the British were explicitly making their rifle and line troops identical in drill and only different in clothing!


I know that the CSA did tests in 1864 to examine long range performance of a number of rifles.

 

[Rhea Cole]

Perhaps I should clarify. The information I posted is just that. A side by side comparison of shots fired by ordinary Civil War era soldiers. Make of it what you may.
At Stones River approx 1,000,000 musket shots were fired over three three days of combat. All but a token number of them missed. Anybody who has ever been in a line where muskets were fired has an educated notion of why so many rounds went astray.
As to my musings regarding General Raines, he was killed a few steps into the cotton field. The men who surged past him were under fire from artillery for five hundred yards before they came into the effective beaten zone of infantry armed with rifles. Following lines were subject to hits by infantry overs after an advance of two to three hundred yards. Having been under increasing volumes of fire for 700 yards, the surviving members of Raines' command could have fired a volley & attacked through the smoke in the best 18th Century style. We will never know what damage that volley would have inflicted. No Confederate attack was pressed home to within the effective range of buck & ball fire. Attacking regiments suffered 30-50 percent losses.
To be fair, just days before the Battle of Stones River, a Florida regiment (the ordinal escapes me) was reequiped with what amounted to a wagon load of scrap. The men who had smoothbore muskets that could be fired carried the hammer in a pocket. The men in the rear ranks carried sticks to give the impression of being armed. In an attack ordered by General Bragg against General Hazen's rifle toting regiments at the Round Forrest, They suffered 85 percent K.I.A., no wounded, no missing. Even a smoothbore musket loaded with buck & ball is better than a stick.
40 percent of Bragg's infantry was armed with a catalogue of rifles of various types & calibers. How effective they were is unknowable.

 

[Saphroneth]

At Stones River approx 1,000,000 musket shots were fired over three three days of combat. All but a token number of them missed. Anybody who has ever been in a line where muskets were fired has an educated notion of why so many rounds went astray.

Yes, poor training.*

If most people were missing at 100 yards (typical firefight range) where a smoothbore is every bit as precise as a musket, surely that indicates they could do no better with a rifle than a smoothbore?

The men who surged past him were under fire from artillery for five hundred yards before they came into the effective beaten zone of infantry armed with rifles. Following lines were subject to hits by infantry overs after an advance of two to three hundred yards. Having been under increasing volumes of fire for 700 yards, the surviving members of Raines' command could have fired a volley & attacked through the smoke in the best 18th Century style. We will never know what damage that volley would have inflicted. No Confederate attack was pressed home to within the effective range of buck & ball fire.

Citation to the effect that there was rifle fire at 300 yards range?


* Well trained British troops at the Alma and Inkerman at ranges of up to five hundred yards achieved a typical hit rate of ca. one in sixteen, which would have resulted in 60,000 casualties at Stones River exclusive of artillery.

 

[Rhea Cole]

Indeed. The issue is not "is a rifle better than a musket for a skilled soldier" but "were Civil War soldiers skilled enough to gain any significant benefit from switching from muskets to rifles"?
With a secondary point of "If Civil War soldiers cannot gain the benefit of a rifle's increased range or accuracy, could they instead get benefit from the spread effect of the buck and ball?"






Simple question. At what point did either side in this engagement - the infantry, not the artillery - actually open fire?
I certainly agree that advancing like this against trained riflemen would be an incredibly painful experience, but that's exactly the thing, because it doesn't seem to have been painful enough for Rains' infantry. It looks like they took enfilade fire from artillery, pressed to within a hundred yards, and stalled within firefight range before being pushed away by a counterattack.

Doctrine was to open fire with rifles at 300 yards. Rifle fire became effective at 300 yards. Overs up to 500 yards would pepper following lines. During Breckinridge's assault on the third day at Stones River, the following ranks crowded up too close & suffered significant casualties from the overs. A man armed with a weapon effective at 100 yards would be under fire for four hundred yards before he could fire an effective shot.
The Confederate attacks across the cotton fields on the afternoon of the last day of 1862 never closed to within short range of Thomas' line along the Nashville Pike. One fell back in disorder when a line overcoats taken off by a Union regiment on their flank caused them to break & run. Apparently, clothing was all that was necessary to repulse an attack. Cleburne's men made the last attempt to break Rosecrans' line. They advanced into the cotton field, came under fire, & immediately broke to the rear in an unstoppable stampede. They literally knocked their astonished commanders aside in their haste.

 

[Saphroneth]

Doctrine was to open fire with rifles at 300 yards. Rifle fire became effective at 300 yards. Overs up to 500 yards would pepper following lines.

So no, then, no actual citation. Nor explanation for why (this supposed) doctrine wasn't followed at e.g. Gettysburg.

(Mind you, I'd also accept some indication that significant marksmanship training took place among the Union regiments in the Western Armies, though I doubt you'd be able to find any.)

 

[thomas aagaard]

Doctrine was to open fire with rifles at 300 yards. Rifle fire became effective at 300 yards.

Source?
The drill books don't have any doctrinal stuff like when to open fire.*
And I never seen anything about it in the regulations.

So please tell us where you find this "doctrine"

the following ranks crowded up too close & suffered significant casualties from the overs.

This just prove how poor shots the enemy where. They where overshooting a lot. The exact problem with rifle-musket fire at long range. It is somewhat similar to throwing a basketball into the basket.
At long range the bullet come down at a rather steep angle, so the danger zone is rather small. So your estimation of the range is very important.

--
* It is actually one of the big issues with the french drill books that was used. Both when it come to understanding them today but also for using them as a tool back then. They very rarely tell you when to use a specific evolution or why. It tell how to open fire, but not at what range or when you should use the different ways of giving fire.

 

[FedericoFCavada]

I might add to Paddy Griffith's work Earl J. Hess, The Rifle Musket in Civil War Combat: Reality and Myth that contests the notion that the rifle musket marked a watershed in military history, simply because the majority of soldiers North and South lacked the marksmanship training to make use of the vastly increased range and greater precision. There is a dataset that he created to make his arguments, which may be of use.

Claud Fuller's book is great, but it really is at the level of the testing done by U.S. Ordnance to establish a reduction in caliber from .69 to .58, and the tests done so that the U.S. army could have the latest, cutting-edge weaponry of the day...

Earl J. Hess's book publisher:

The Rifle Musket in Civil War Combat

The Civil War's single-shot, muzzle-loading musket revolutionized warfare-or so we've been told for years. Noted historian Earl J. Hess forcefully challenges that claim, offering a new, clear-eyed, and convincing assessment of the rifle musket's actual pe

kansaspress.ku.edu

A review:

Murray on Hess, 'The Rifle Musket in Civil War Combat: Reality and Myth' | H-Net

Earl J. Hess. The Rifle Musket in Civil War Combat: Reality and Myth. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2008. 288 pp. $29.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-7006-1607-7. Reviewed by Jennifer Murray (Department of History, Auburn University) Published on H-CivWar (March, 2009) Commissioned by Hugh F...

networks.h-net.org

A search of the forum will turn up discussion and debate and critique of his arguments.

 

[Rhea Cole]

So no, then, no actual citation. Nor explanation for why (this supposed) doctrine wasn't followed at e.g. Gettysburg.

(Mind you, I'd also accept some indication that significant marksmanship training took place among the Union regiments in the Western Armies, though I doubt you'd be able to find any.)

I have no idea what you would call significant, but I encounter references to firing practice quite often. If you do not trust that I am basing my comments on facts, you should make your comments to somebody you do.
The hardest thing to get used to was the odd trajectory of the minnie ball is so eccentric. Spencer Sober relates an occasion where his regiment fired at a mark on a big tree. In that early war instance of target practice a nice tight patch of bark was knocked off about a foot over the target.
As to the three hundred yards, that was where rifled musket fire became effective, so as a result, opening fire at that range was what they did.

 

[Saphroneth]

I have no idea what you would call significant, but I encounter references to firing practice quite often. The hardest thing to get used to was the odd trajectory of the minnie ball.

Well, something that contradicted Paddy Griffith's work would be good.

"There does appear to have been a serious lack of target practice in the armies of both sides, and we find that when it did occur most diarists regarded it as a highly exceptional event." Paddy Griffith, Battle Tactics of the American Civil War, p. 87

To give you some idea of what an army not noted for musketry did for training (the Austrians, who were worse at musketry than the British, the French and the Prussians) the Austrians before the Austro-Prussian War fired twenty practice rounds per man per year at known ranges; that is, a regiment of 500 men would expend 10,000 shots in practice per year, in addition to the training given to new recruits. The British and the Prussians fired about five times that many practice shots and often over unknown ranges.

Undoubtedly the occasional musketry practice session took place. But if every man in the army was trained at range estimation and fired fifty practice rounds a year, some of them at unknown ranges, that would approach the kind of thing required to make rifle fire effective out past 100 yards (i.e. "point blank" range.)



As for the odd trajectory of the Minie ball, there's no such thing. It's a parabola, the same as with any other ballistic projectile; the only unusual thing about it is that it actually matters. (And it's "minie" or "minié", not "minnie" because the word is French. The minnie ball is an event at Disney World.)

 

[Saphroneth]

If you do not trust that I am basing my comments on facts, you should make your comments to somebody you do.

You've claimed specifically that "doctrine" was to open fire at 300 yards but you haven't actually provided a citation; doing so would be helpful. If of course you feel one of my claims requires a better source you are welcome to challenge me in turn.

Spencer Sober relates an occasion where his regiment fired at a mark on a big tree. In that early war instance of target practice a nice tight patch of bark was knocked off about a foot over the target.

Does he happen to say at what range this took place? Was it a known range or one they had to estimate?
Minie rifles don't fire high; if you have the sights set correctly for the distance and line them up they shoot straight. That's sort of the point of the sights.

As to the three hundred yards, that was where rifled musket fire became effective, so as a result, opening fire at that range was what they did.

This is not far off circular reasoning - the troops at Stones River opened fire at 300 yards.
Why? Because it was doctrine.
Why was it doctrine? Because that's effective range.

You need to break out of the loop by providing a citation, either to the effect that fire was opened at Stones River at 300 yards or to the effect that doctrine was to open fire at 300 yards.

 

[thomas aagaard]

As to the three hundred yards, that was where rifled musket fire became effective, so as a result, opening fire at that range was what they did.

On this forum it is tradition that when people ask for your source you post it.

Please post evidence that 300yards was the doctrinal range you opened fire.
It should be easy... since for something to be doctrinal it need to be clearly described in regulations, drill books or similar to be just that.

 

[Saphroneth]

As an interesting aside on why exactly it is that range estimation is so very important, if you have a regiment who think they're opening fire at 300 yards but they're actually aiming at people 250 yards away then their bullets will largely not hit even if the sights are correctly set. Range estimation is a skill, you have to learn it, and men who don't can actually find the sights on a weapon worse than useless.

 

[Robin Lesjovitch]

If I may, because of the .58-.577 tendency to foul rifling after 10-20 rounds, officers rarely ordered general fire at extreme ranges. It was the officers who decided when firing should commence. 150-200 yards might be a good average.

 

[Rhea Cole]

On this forum it is tradition that when people ask for your source you post it.

Please post evidence that 300yards was the doctrinal range you opened fire.
It should be easy... since for something to be doctrinal it need to be clearly described in regulations, drill books or similar to be just that.

I am curious, what range do you think they opened fire & why? Don't fire until you see the whites of their eyes was a real order. At that range, a volley exchange could be fired & the line could bayonet charge out of the smoke could be made before the opposing line could reload. There are certain things that are so because they made tactical sense.

The tactics that had been taught since the inception of the black powder age had varied only slightly. Initially, it was line up, march to within fifty yards (because that was the effective range of large caliber smooth bore muskets) fire a couple of volleys & bayonet charge out of the smoke. Early bayonets were knives that were stuck directly into the muzzle, effectively turning the musket into a pike. It would take some time before Civil War soldiers learned that rifled muskets had made the musket as spear tactic obsolete, suicidal in fact.

Fredericksburg

The 26th NYVI attacked at daylight on the 17th. Formed in line of battle, the regiment halted 500 yards fro the woods... About 350 yards from the enemy, incoming fire forced a deployment in line of battle along a fence. After firing thirty rounds per man, they stopped firing. The Confederates advanced again, forcing the Volunteers to open fire again... The regiment retired as their relief arrived, having lost 66 soldiers.
OR, XIX, p.263.

...The skirmishers withdrew from heavy fire from the enemy, who was posted behind a stone wall. After skirmishers fell back, the first line moved forward to within 300 yard of the enemy's line. After a "severe engagement" & after a "most gallant infantry charge" the enemy withdrew. The cost was 511 soldiers.
OR, XIX, p. 380-381.

"It was no longer a battle of pikes or bayonets. The range of the rifle enlarged the killing zone from hand-to-hand to something beyond three hundred yards. Consequently, units became engaged much earlier, were exposed for longer periods of time & found it difficult to disengage. Running out of ammunition, which happened frequently, was cause to disengage -- quickly. But units could not withdraw, unless they were relieved by a supporting force, or were forced to hold their ground at the "point of the bayonet", which was not very effective."

"The rifle was superior to the musket in every way. The minnie ball gave it equal or better reload times, its range was double or triple that of a musket & it could be expected to hit what it was aimed at--even at 500 yards. Tactics designed to maximize the killing power of the bayonet, & the pike, would not work against the rifle."
Major Richard E. Kerr, Jr U.S.A.

It seems to me that the 1860 Ordinance Bureau test in The Rifled Musket by Claud E. Fuller, my personal knowledge of the Battle of Stones River, the OR & Major Kerr's modern day analysis of Civil War tactics constitutes a compelling body of references. In my folder on Civil War tactics I probably have twenty or thirty citations dealing with the early war tactical learning curve that refer either directly or indirectly to the 300 yard range of rifles.