Still further, matters had at no time "looked favorably" on the right up to ten o'clock. The condition, therefore, which was assumed as precedent to Burnside's movement, never existed; and this was better known to McClellan than to any one else, for he received the first discouraging reports after Mansfield fell, and the subsequent alarming ones when Sedgwick was routed. Burnside's report was dated on the 30th of September, within two weeks of the battle, and at a time when public discussion of the incomplete results of the battle was animated. It was made after he had in his hands my own report as his immediate subordinate, in which I had given about nine o'clock as my remembrance of the time. [Footnote: _Id_., p. 424.] As I directed the details of the action at the bridge in obedience to this order, it would have been easy for him to have accepted the hour named by me, for I should have been answerable for any delay in execution after that time. But he then had in his possession the order which came to him upon the hill-top overlooking the field, and no officer in the whole army has a better established reputation for candor and freedom from any wish to avoid full personal responsibility for his acts. It was not till his report was published in the Official Records (1887) [Footnote: _Id_., p. 416.] that I saw it or learned its contents, although I enjoyed his personal friendship down to his death. He was content to have stated the fact as he knew it, and did not feel the need of debating it. The circumstances have satisfied me that his accuracy in giving the hour was greater than my own. [Footnote: Upon reflection, I think it probable that the order from McClellan was read to me, and that I thus got the hour of its date connected in my mind with the beginning of our attack.] It will not be wondered at, therefore, if to my mind the story of the eight o'clock order is an instance of the way in which an erroneous recollection is based upon the desire to make the facts accord with a theory. The actual time must have been as much later than nine o'clock as the period during which, with absorbed attention, we had been watching the battle on the right,--a period, it is safe to say, much longer than it seemed to us. The judgment of the hour which I gave in my report was merely my impression from passing events, for I hastened at once to my own duties without thinking to look at my watch; whilst the cumulative evidence seems to prove, conclusively, that the time stated by Burnside, and by McClellan himself in his original report, is correct. The order, then, to Burnside to attack was not sent at eight o'clock, but reached him at ten; it was not sent to follow up an advantage gained by Hooker and Sumner, but to create, if possible, a strong diversion in favor of the imperilled right wing when the general outlook was far from reassuring.