One important point that needs to be made about Pickett’s Charge is that it probably would have worked in the last war. The only way they had of finding out that this sort of charge was no longer effective was to try it. It’s easy to look back and say they shouldn’t have done that, but they had no way of knowing that it was going to fail beforehand, and if it would have worked, they would have broken the Union line and would have had a straight shot at the capitol.
The lesson learned during the Revolutionary War was that you had to mass your troops, or else the British would advance in mass and overwhelm you. Generals during the Civil War were a bit reluctant to abandon these tactics because they knew how badly things could go if you didn’t use them.
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Revolutionary war / Napoleonic war, the troops used muzzle-loading smooth-bore as I understand. The resulting gunfire was painfully inaccurate, so the appropriate tactic was to line up a huge line of troops, have them all fire at the general direction of the other side’s, and fire; they’d hope to hit some of them. The gunpowder was so smoky that they wore bright uniforms so youu could tell one side from the other in the chaos.
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That’s true to some degree, but people tend to think of muskets as being a lot like modern rifles since they look a lot like a modern rifle. In reality, they were not used much at all like a modern rifle. In modern warfare, a rifle is something that shoots. A musket is a combination distance weapon (the shooting part) and hand to hand weapon (the bayonet). Muskets replaced both archers (or crossbowmen) and the pikemen that surrounded them, and in all wars prior to the Civil War the bayonet played an extremely important role on the battlefield. During the Napoleonic Wars and the U.S. Revolutionary war, bayonets accounted for roughly a third of all battlefield casualties, and George Washington himself got his backside kicked up and down the battlefield until Valley Forge, when among other things (like starving to death) he got his troops properly trained in bayonet fighting.
During the Civil War, the changes in musket technology and tactics turned the bayonet from being one of your primary important infantry weapons to being the last ditch weapon that it is today. Instead of being responsible for a third of all battlefield casualties as they previously had been, they dropped to being responsible for less than 1 percent of battlefield casualties during the Civil War.
As for tactics, one thing that got Washington into a lot of trouble early on was not massing his troops against the British. You might think that it would be better to hide behind trees and cover instead of just standing in a big group like that where you can all be easily picked off, but that didn’t work out very well. The British would stand in mass and fire in mass, turning their inaccurate muskets into a huge shotgun type of blast that just obliterates anything in front of their army. Then the British would charge in a long line. Now you are hiding behind a tree, and there’s a huge line of British guys coming at you. What you see is a big unbroken line of guys with pointy things, and your side isn’t organized into a big long line to stop them. The British would quickly overwhelm the American positions and the American troops had little choice except to scatter and flee.
At Valley Forge, Washington (with some notable foreign help) got his troops properly trained in military discipline and up close and personal bayonet fighting. It was only after this that Washington’s troops could finally go toe to toe against the British.
This was the style of warfare that they were used to. You don’t abandon your big massive formations because if you do, their big massive formations will overwhelm you. This makes it easier to understand why they did things that in retrospect seem rather foolish, like Pickett’s devastating charge.
Individually though, you are correct. A smooth bore musket is painfully inaccurate. The round ball will randomly hit one side or another as it travels down the barrel, imparting a random spin on it, so a musket almost always fires a curve ball. It will go straight for maybe 50 to 75 yards. After that, which way it goes is anyone’s guess. It used to be said that you could stand 200 yards away from a single musketeer and not fear getting shot by him.
In mass, though, musket fire was quite deadly.
They had rifles around back then, but in order to be effective, a rifle round has to fit tightly in the barrel so that it grips the rifling and spins as it comes out. After a few shots, black powder fouls the barrel, and a rifle gets to be very difficult to load. As you pointed out, there was also a lot of smoke on the battlefield, which made the longer range of the rifle of little use. Some commanders (like Napoleon) considered rifles to be of so little value that they didn’t even use them. The British army used them, but only for specialized sharpshooting where the slow loading problem wasn’t an issue. Regular infantry didn’t get rifles until the Minie ball solved the barrel fouling problem. Minie style rifles got their start in the 1840s, and started getting widely issued through the 1850s, just prior to the Civil War.
You can make an argument that they should have concentrated on repeating rifles to take advantage of their faster rate of fire, but repeating rifles are more complex and arms shortages played a major role in the war as it was.
People these days tend to think of muskets as crude and weak weapons, but a Civil War era rifled musket actually compares fairly well against a modern rifle. I happen to own a reproduction 1853 Enfield (it’s an accurate enough reproduction that you could swap parts with it and a real antique Enfield), and it is a very accurate weapon. It shoots a big honkin piece of lead at about 1,000 fps. A modern rifle shoots a much lighter round at a higher velocity, so the Civil War Enfield will drop more at a distance than a modern rifle, but otherwise the Enfield is extremely accurate. There are plenty of stories of well trained marksmen being able to hit a man sized target at 600 yards (the Enfield’s sights actually go out to 900 yards, but realistically hitting anything past 600 yards is mostly luck).
The Minie ball had a fearsome reputation in its day, and if I had my choice, I would much rather be shot by a modern rifle than a Civil War rifle (well actually I’d rather not get shot at all, but you know what I mean). The wounds from a Minie ball are much worse.
I keep a Minie ball and a round ball in my desk at work. People are always amazed at how big and heavy they are compared to a modern round.
At the beginning of the war there were fewer than 2000 Marines, and some defected to the enemy.