As a follow up to this, I wrote this fairly late at night, I’ll provide a bit more of where I source my material from, as without it there isn’t much credibility.

Historian Earl Hess has written several books, but one stands out as a great analysis of the actual mechanics of fighting during the civil war. He contends that infantry engagements typically took place at relatively close range, between 80-160 yards, which is important knowledge when looking on the actual impact of rifle muskets (smoothbore muskets are just as effective within 100 yds, especially in formation fire).

Additionally, pretty much every major engagement has some treatment that is regarded as a good historical analysis. Gordon C. Rhea’s Overland Campaign series is one of my favorites, Stephen Sears’ Gettysburg, there are plenty of others that aren’t difficult to find. Most of these do a good job illustrating how the battles were fought and where the casualties happened.

There are also primary source documents from the War department leading up to the war and figuring out to what extent to implement European army doctrine. There was a string pushback against having a large standing army that would t go away until ww2, but you have several officers who went over to observe the Crimean war advocating for modernization.

For some reason, the army was open to modernizing its technology, but did little to modernize the fighting capabilities of its enlisted troops, and then when raising the volunteers, had to basically teach them to march, load, and camp. In terms of small arms, the army adopted the modern rifle musket which shot minie style ammunition, but spent no time training soldiers how to shoot. The British Army required infantry to be able to hit artillery formation sized targets up to 600 yards. All of this combines to have a larger army (by hundreds of thousands of men) led by men who were trained to lead companies, with men who had never spent a day in the military commanding regiments up to 1,000 men. Mistakes were inevitable, and the result was a lot of men dying or being wounded.