This post from Reddit is making me inquisitive.
The stereotype of Napoleonic Warfare and indeed any gunpowder war before the World War 1 is that soldiers just line up and shoot without regard to marksmanship because they assume that an enemy will get hit in the mass fire of volley. So much that I seen comments about how you don't even have to hold your rifle properly and you just shoot it in the American Civil War and earlier because you are guaranteed to hit an enemy in the mass rigid square blocks they are stuck in.
However this thread on suppressive fire in modern warfare made me curious.
https://www.reddit.com/r/WarCollege/comments/7vkubw/how_important_is_individual_marksmanship_is_in
The creator of the above link states despite the cliche that hundreds of bullets are spent to kill a single enemy and most tactics in modern war involves spraying at an enemy to get him to become too scared to shoot back and hide while you have one person sneak up behind the now cowering enemy and kill him, plenty of marksmanship training is still done in modern warfare.
So I have to ask if marksmanship was important even in volley fire seen before WW1 in the American Civil War and other earlier time periods in particular Napoleonic? Is it misunderstood much like modern suppression tactics is by people where they get the wrong impression that you just spray bullets on an enemy and marksmanship doesn't matter because your buddies will sneak behind them and kill them? Is it more than just "spray bullets nonstop and hope it hits the guy in front of you in a bayonet block"?
He does bring a good point about one thing-why did soldiers prior to World War 1 esp in the era of 1 bullet guns like Napoleonic and American Civil War bother learning proper stances and how to hold a rifle if warfare in the time used nonstop volleys after volleys while in formation because you'd be too blinded to shoot because of the smoke from shooting guns creating fog in the battle field? If that was true, why did soldiers bother even aiming on their iron sights as they began their volleys?
If individual aiming was useless, why not have soldiers just fire their guns at random from the hip or some other sloppy random shooting method? Why did soldiers still train to lay their eyes near the rifle as they shot like modern hunters do while aiming at deer and other prey? If volleys were used during this time because speed of shooting bullets and reloading ASAP to shoot again was the key to victory, why bother teaching soldiers on how to hold rifles in a specific way during the gunpowder eras when guns contained only a single bullet esp in the Napoleonic Wars and before Abraham Lincoln was assassinated? Most of all why did American Civil War soldiers, Revolutionary War troops, and Napoleonic armies bother aiming on their iron sights if gun accuracy was so poor and armies were expected to close in and shoot nonstop volleys where speed of reloading guns was of utmost important? Esp if the battlefield was expected to be covered with smoke thus blinding soldiers? Why no armies ever did volley fire at the hips or some random disorganized way if accuracy was based on how close you were to the enemy and the smoke blinded soldiers' vision? Why bother even aiming on your iron sights at all in such circumstances esp with the method of fighting in this era?
It is to do with fire effect and the trajectory of the ball. Random firing does not have the effect of controlled fire both on the target and morale. In addition, if you fire level, due to gravity, the ball will gradually drop, but you know the distance it is likely to travel. If you fire from the hip, you can quite easily impart a few degrees up or down without knowing and thus will change the distance the ball travels or the height at which the ball strikes the target at a given distance. If you establish a drill, it is also easier to control the unit as it goes through those drills.
Seems some Famous Russian commanders think that too. Yet Alexander Mikaberidze's Russian Artillery officer biography had a task to go around and survey small arms for awhile, you had to arm troops with something.
Some countries did expend resources training troops with live fire. Getting troops to fire with all arms leveled was a attempt to fire correctly as a unit.
I have a replica Brown Bess, while been some time since had it out, at least up a step on how to hit a mark.