But the demand on the part of press, pulpit and people for an immediate advance was too insistent, too clamorous, and was rapidly becoming too angry to be longer resisted. It was reinforced by an almost equally insistent demand on the part of the civilian authorities at Washington, whose ignorance of military conditions was scarcely less pronounced than that of the excited editors and orators of the country. It was decided therefore to advance the army and bring on the hazardous battle against the better judgment of every trained military man at Washington. General Scott was still in supreme command of the army, but he was much too old and too feeble to conduct the perilous enterprise in person. General Irwin McDowell was chosen to plan the battle and fight it. He had never commanded an army before or conducted a campaign, but neither had any other officer then available, and his technical knowledge of strategy was thorough. On this occasion his plan of battle was admirable, one of the best, General Sherman has said, that was formed at any time during the war. It was essentially identical with that afterwards adopted by General Lee at the Seven Days' Battles and again at Chancellorsville. A reconnoissance in force was made against the Confederate lines along Bull Run on Thursday, the eighteenth of July, which disclosed the fact that the Confederates were fully entrenched in a strong position which commanded the crossings of the stream and the plateau over which it must be approached. Having found out all this, General McDowell decided to bring on a battle on Sunday, July the twenty-first. It is not the purpose of the present writer to tell the story of Manassas or that of any other battle in military detail. That has been done too often already, to the hopeless confusion of the civilian reader's mind. Only an intelligible outline is attempted here, with no effort to locate this or that division or brigade or regiment or battery upon the field or to follow out the details of any movement made by any of them. Beauregard held his line along the stream known as Bull Run, over a space of several miles. This line had been established in defense of the railroad "junction" at Manassas where the line of the Orange and Alexandria railroad joined that of the Manassas Gap railroad. This position was suggested by the artificial geography of railroad construction. It was defended by the natural physical geography of Bull Run, which furnished the Confederates a comparatively good, though by no means a strategically satisfactory, line of defensive fighting.