what is really needed, then, is better weapons, such as bolt-action magazine rifles. Sell 200,000 of THOSE to the Union, and the South will lose in EARLY 1862. Why is it nobody writes TLs like that?
of the U. S. Army Board of Ordinance, was a real dinosaur. He wanted to fight the Civil War with muskets. Kill him off, and the army may get Gatlings, Coffee Mill machine guns, Spencer's, Henry's, and OF COURSE Sharpe's rifles. Shoot the Confee fools to pieces.
That would be a pretty big deal by itself. A company of skirmishers with the firepower of a brigade?How much harder would they be to kill? A lot.
Even if the dispersal only goes up 4-5:1, which is less than half what it did OTL by WW1.
Even so, it doesn't fit the existing premise- which is to have Union troops armed with repeaters from the start. By the time you've manufactured and distributed large numbers of repeaters, a halfway competent war strategy should have the Confederacy start to totter. The problem is that the domestic industrial sector needs time to gear up, but most European powers have only just rearmed with rifle muskets and they aren't available in surplus in large quantities. Getting everybody armed with rifled muskets is an achievement under the circumstances,though not one which people tend to credit.