That’s not true. many Civil War generals died to “random” rifle fire and this is hardly unknown. Sedgewick was indentified as having been specifically killed by a small group of Confederate sharpshooters specifically located on the battlefield.
The Afghan Jezil which caused the British all soughts of woe, was reputed to easily outrange the British Enfield. Though if memory serves many were still matchlocks.
The Afghan Jezail usually went up against the British Brown Bess, which was a .75 caliber smooth bore flintlock musket. The Jezail was hand made, and therefore there isn’t one “jezail”. They were generally very long rifled weapons, similar to the Pennsylvania and Kentucky rifles, though smooth bore jezails also existed. They often used flintlock mechanisms scavenged from captured Brown Bess or other muskets, which the Afghans would mate to their own custom barrel and stock. Jezails were often ornately carved and typically had a stylishly curved stock, in sharp contrast to the much more plain Kentucky rifles which were utilitarian in design and not ornate.
Pennsylvania and Kentucky rifles were generally used for hunting, and were of smaller caliber than military weapons. Your typical Pennsylvania rifle was in the .40 to .45 caliber range. Jezails were military weapons and were of larger caliber than the Kentucky and Pennsylvania rifles, up in the .60 and .70 caliber ranges.
The range of a rifled jezail was typically comparable to the range of a Kentucky or Pennsylvania rifle. It fired a round ball, so even with the rifling you’re talking about an accurate range out to about 300 yards. The later Enfield, with its conical bullet, had a better range than the jezail, but that’s due to a better bullet, not a better rifle. The Brown Bess that the jezail often went up against, being a typical smooth bore flintlock, had an accurate range in the 50 to 75 yard range. This caused the British to often get spanked when they went up against the Afghans.
The jezail was just a cool weapon, so often its abilities were somewhat overstated.
For whatever reason, long rifles like the Kentucky Rifle and the Jezail never caught on in Europe. They were distinct to America and the Muslim lands.
There is a very interesting book on Mughal warfare that discusses this vis-a-vis India a bit. It came from a very different notion of the operational value of firearms due to some cultural differences. Ultimately the heavily cavalry-based native armies prized range and accuracy above all else and utilized firearms ( including field guns ) a bit like snipers, completely ignoring massed fire. To the Mughals at least, firearms were auxiliary and subsidiary to massed horse-archers or other cavalry formations - Mughal armies tended to function a little like 15th/16th century Ottoman armies with the artillery park in a fixed centre and big mobile wings of mounted archers that were the main arm of decision. European visitors were often astonished to find that contemporary Mughal guns consistently outranged their European counterparts ( or would have in some cases, the biggest impediment being the also consistently dire quality of Indian gunpowder ).
I just had a Jezail in my hands 3 days ago in a pawn shop. Other than the lock was loose and the stock damaged around the lock it looked exactly like this one. Exactly design wise not condition. cost $350.00
Any incoming fire would cause all kinds of woe. especially if its fired at me.
John Sedgwick was killed by musket fire in May 1864 early on in the Battle of Spotsylvania while supervising the placement of artillery batteries as the Union army came into position after disengaging from Lee’s army at the Battle of the Wilderness. The battery he was visiting was being annoyed by long range fire by Confederate skirmishers and he was hit in the head and killed just after admonishing the artillerymen for seeking cover from what amounted to random harassing fire.
There is no reliable information that the people who killed Sedgwick were anything other than ordinary soldiers from ordinary companies of ordinary infantry regiments which were taking their turn on the skirmish line – there is certainly none that the particular people on the skirmish line that day were any sort of elite sharpshooters. Those soldiers were simply infantrymen firing at a target that was about 100 yards wide and 6 feet high and maybe a half mile away. That Sedgwick, or anyone else was hit by that fire was just Uncle John’s bad luck. The idea that a particular person had been targeted just strains a reasonable and critical man’s credulity.
Re: the jezail.
I am literally in the middle of moving house, and so all my books are packed up, but I recall reading in the excellent “The Frontier Scouts” by Chenevix-Trench that prior to large numbers of Martini-Henry rifles being dumped on the market in Africa and India (circa early 1890s, IIRC), officers of Scouts and Frontier Force Rifles on the North-West Frontier did not have to bother “crowning the heights” with pickets as they advanced through valleys, the range being too great for jezails.
The replacement of jezails by Martinis increased the range and accuracy of the tribesmens’ fire to the point that new tactics had to be developed, i.e. sending lightly-equipped patrols along the high ground of one’s route to keep the Wazirs, Afridis or Mahsuds from sniping effectively. (Generally the Scouts provided this defensive service to the slow, conventionally-trained regular British Army battalions labouring through the mountains).
I cannot recommend that book highly enough; nearly all the place-names mentioned along the (then) Frontier are all in the news. These tribesmen were quite literally the great-grandfathers of the Taliban, and were every bit as hard and intractable.
Mughal tactics, called for bombardment with cannon and rockets at extremly long range, in their earlier campaigns in India, they were often outnumbered, musketeers did fire enmass when the closed with the enemy, but they were also expected to aim their shots.
These tactics are what the British came up against when the faced Mysore, both haider Ali and then his son Tipu Sultan defeated the British this way. The British response was to quickly charge and be upon the enemy with bayonets, S Asian armies not having the dicipline that the redcoats famously displayed
Even then over the 2 hundred years the British were in India they did occcassionally get caught out, at Chillianwallah in 1846 6 regiments lost their colours.
Re the Jezil, Jezil simply means firearm in Persian (the other word is “toradar”; muzzel loader). The Jezils that are alluded to above are basically weapons made by the user for his own use, I am talking about the firearms of the Durrani Empire that the British faced in the 1840’s and the 1878-1880 campaign; in that especially during the attack on Elphinstones army and then at Maiwand, the British found themselves consistantly outgunned.