It's not ACW soldiers or contemporaries that I'm as concerned about in this case, but the more modern authors/historians. I've seen "6 pounder howitzer" or "6 pounder brass howitzer" enough in modern print that I've ended up doing a fair bit of searching around to see if I could figure out if there was particular piece that somehow differed and was incorrectly referred to as a howitzer. Right now, I'm still not sure. I know in some instances that a 6 pounder gun was the item of discussion, but others might be 12 pounder mountain howitzers or something else entirely that I had not considered. I'm wondering if there is something well known that I'm missing...

The pounder versus bore designations of course became completely muddied with the introduction of the rifled cannon, since two separate systems were being merged. I can understand why contemporary soldiers/officers/authors would have been thrown off by the mixed system. The pounder designation gets particularly confusing with the James Rifles.