Weed delivered his message.  Seymour was noncommittal and Lincoln had to wait for his answer until the new Governor should show his hand by his official acts.  Meanwhile a new crisis had developed in the army.  Burnside’s character appears to have been shattered by his defeat.  Previous to Fredericksburg, he had seemed to be a generous, high-minded man.  From Fredericksburg onward, he became more and more an impossible.  A reflection of McClellan in his earlier stage, he was somehow transformed eventually into a reflection of vindictivism.  His later character began to appear in his first conference with the Committee subsequent to his disaster.  They visited him on the field and “his conversation disarmed all criticism.”  This was because he struck their own note to perfection.  “Our soldiers,” he said, “were not sufficiently fired by resentment, and he exhorted me (Julian) if I could, to breathe into our people at home the same spirit toward our enemies which inspired them toward us."(6) What a transformation in McClellan’s disciple!

But the country was not won over so easily as the Committee.  There was loud and general disapproval and of course, the habitual question, “Who next?” The publication by the Committee of its insinuation that once more the stubborn President was the real culprit did not stem the tide.  Burnside himself made his case steadily worse.  His judgment, such as it was, had collapsed.  He seemed to be stubbornly bent on a virtual repetition of his previous folly.  Lincoln felt it necessary to command him to make no forward move without consulting the President.(7)

Burnside’s subordinates freely criticized their commander.  General Hooker was the most outspoken.  It was known that a movement was afoot—­an intrigue, if you will-to disgrace Burnside and elevate Hooker.  Chafing under criticism and restraint, Burnside completely lost his sense of propriety.  On the twenty-fourth of January, 1863, when Henry W. Raymond, the powerful editor of the New York Times, was on a visit to the camp, Burnside took him into his tent and read him an order removing Hooker because of his unfitness “to hold a command in a cause where so much moderation, forbearance, and unselfish patriotism were required.”  Raymond, aghast, inquired what he would do if Hooker resisted, if he raised his troops in mutiny?  “He said he would Swing him before sundown if he attempted such a thing.”

Raymond, though more than half in sympathy with Burnside, felt that the situation was startling.  He hurried off to Washington.  “I immediately,” he writes, “called upon Secretary Chase and told him the whole story.  He was greatly surprised to hear such reports of Hooker, and said he had looked upon him as the man best fitted to command the army of the Potomac.  But no man capable of so much and such unprincipled ambition was fit for so great a trust, and he gave up all thought of him henceforth.  He wished me to go with him to his house and accompany