Most were not very accurate in combat for a number of reasons (two being the aforementioned limited training and smoke buildup, which would not be rectified until smokeless powder in the late 1880s). Your typical soldier, at least from the Naploeonic Wars to the American Civil War, only had live fire training a few times a year and was not allotted much more than 6-30 rounds for it. The biggest issue with breechloaders was ammo consumption. It was four times as expensive as a standard smoothbore, and even a good gunsmith was apparently unable to make 25 given half a year. Its issues were the usual ones: fragility and cost, especially the latter. It even had the advantage of being much lighter than the standard smoothbore, at 7.5 pounds vs the 10.5 pounds of the "Brown Bess." He then wet the inside of the barrel, waited a minute, and proceeded to fire it again, showing it was resilient in the face of disadvantageous weather. Patrick Ferguson conducted tests in which he fired one of his rifles for several minutes at a rate of 6 rounds per minute at a target 200 yards distant while missing fewer than three shots. Contemporary effective range for a smoothbore musket against a man-sized target was 80-100 yards (for example, Colonel George Hanger notes this figure in "To all Sportsmen"). It could also be reloaded from cover and was highly accurate. This as compared to a musketeer with a muzzle-loading smoothbore who averaged 3-4 shots per minute if they were good (for further context, most riflemen were limited to 1 shot per minute due to the trouble of jamming a spherical ball down a grooved tube). By virtue of being a breechloader, a rifleman could skip multiple steps of the reload process (most notably shoving the bullet down the barrel with a ramrod), allowing him to maintain a firing rate of 6-8 shots per minute ( this fat old man demonstrates). It was a very well-made breechloading rifle in an era of muzzle-loading smoothbores.
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