Ken,

Somewhere in the big pile of stuff I have gotten lately, Is aw something about this alleged Irish moon and Cleburne's flag.

It is rubbish.

CLeburne did not design the flag and neither did Hardee (both have never claimed anything for it), and Buckner did claim it - and I believe did it. Hardee and Buckner are not Irish - and this nonsense about the South being overwhelmingly Celtic is also crap - it was overwhelmingly English with pockets of Celtic descent.

Thus, anything about Irish lore being well known is just as much mythology as is the claim that the Southern Cross flags were patterned after the flag of Scotland. Only one actually was - the battle flag of John McCown's Division of the Army of Kentucky in the summer of 1862 - and he was of Scottish descent!

I just spent the day at Duke University yesterday working with one of two known copies of Raphael P. Thian's book that documents the creation of the Confederate national flags taken from the records of the Committees on Flag & Seal as well as the CS Congress, and Miles designed the Southern Cross flag and was not of Celtic heritage and only did so to allay criticism of the cross of St. George flags that were overwhelmingly coming in for consideration.

I took a statistical sampling of these flag designs and will post them in a seperate email here.

Greg Biggs