Glenn,

Please stop the personal pity party and sit back and take stock of not only what I have been saying, but what you have been saying.

So a handful of people in Charleston of Scottish descent name a hall for St. Andrew. They WHY, when they had the chance to send in their own personal designs for the first flag of the Confederacy, did they not just bury the Flag Committee with saltire/St. Andrews cross flags? If there was all of this Scots DNA flowing through the South as Grady McWhiney claimed in "Cracker Culture," a book that has been completely dismantled by not only historians but also professional geneaologists, then why did this not happen? This was their BIG chance to show this alleged Scots heritage Glenn, and you are running away from the facts that I have posted on this board by taking cheap shots at me and Howard Madaus (who damn near died recently) and going with more mythology than anything resembling historical facts!. As a reminder for you - there are only SIX flags out of over 200 submitted to the Flag Committee with this cross as a predominant design. That speaks volumes to me that this symbol was not that big of a factor in Southern culture in the mid-19th Century.

If you want to take me on with this, then do so with facts! That is what good historians do. You have run away from that simple fact since I have posted it and I, for one, will not let you off the hook.

You have also run away from the posts that I did about William Porcher Miles and what he said and wrote from February, 1861 through September, 1861 - especially when he said that his design for the flag as submitted to Beauregard for the battle flag of the soon to be ANV had nothing "ecclesiastical" about it! This translates in plain English to NO RELIGIOUS CONNECTION! Thus, to Miles, the man that designed this pattern of flag, St. Andrew did not mean squat to him nor did it enter his thinking process!Miles designed this pattern and did so, in his own words, because of the flack he received from Charleston's Jews via Charles Moise and from fundamentalist Christian churches. These letters are in Robert Bonner's fine CS flags book as well as in the record of the Committee of Flag and Seal.

Quit running away from the words of the men that designed and perpetrated this flag Glenn and deal with what they themselves said in 1861 about the flag!

What are you so afraid of Glenn - perhaps learning that these myths are just that - myths? Did you just get crushed when you found out that George Washington did NOT throw a silver dollar across the Potomac because it would have been physically impossible to do at Mt. Vernon? Or how about when you learned that Betsy Ross did NOT design the first US flag ever?

Are we Americans not much better off learning the absolute truth about our great nation's history? Isn't the truth always the best course to follow for history and life in general?

Truth is my only agenda Glenn, and every SCV camp and Civil War Roundtable that I speak to about CS flags learns the truth from me and the vast majority of these fine people thank me for for letting them know how it REALLY was back then. As an SCV member myself, I take that charge that SD Lee gave us deeply to heart and that charge and my pursuit of the truth is all that drives me Glenn. TRUTH!!!!

Sorry that you cannot see this for whatever reason.

Lastly, I got ticked off with your previous post because of the cheap shot you took at Howard Madaus, without whom you wouldn't have a clue of what you were talking about with regards to CS flags! I could care less about cheap shots taken at me - I have Kevlar for skin - but when you take cheap shots at Madaus, who is not on this board to defend himself, then I get angry. That is below any level of dignity that I can think of and certainly below that from anything resembling a true Southern gentleman. You cannot refute his massive research so you take a cheap shot at him for a picture on a website! How friggin' pathetic Glenn! Get over his picture and deal with Abdul and his idiot pals that really want to kill us all because we are ALL Americans!

I also got ticked off because you refuse to debate with facts - and I even put up $100 to challenge you to come up with some facts to back up your claims - and you even ran from this with your post above.

Lastly, here's your chance to issue a complaint for that picture to the webmaster of the Flags of the Confederacy website - who happens to be that great Southern gentleman Devereaux Cannon, proud SCV member, another mentor of mine and as nice a man as I have ever met! Just a reminder, Devereaux doesn't buy this Scots/St. Andrews cross stuff either - but he is the guy to send that complaint to about Madaus' picture on the website.

In closing Glenn, this "adulation" that you cite is from people that have also sought to learn more about those flags we all love. I put no gun to any of their heads nor bought them off with money - they are free-thinking Americans, predominantly Southern, who have heard what I have said over the years here and done their own research to verify what I have stated. I expect that of them as I would of myself if I see a claim and want to chase it down for not only accuracy's sake, but also was the claim complete. That's the trained newspaperman in me.

You also seem to forget that I have mentioned here in this exhange that I, too, once believed in the story of St. Andrew as a basis for this flag a long time ago. But that story does not hold up on any factual basis once you start digging into the words of the two men that actually created and perpetrated this famous battle flag design, and so, because of my years of research, I do not believe in the story of St. Andrew having anything to do with this famous flag. There is simply no proof! I did not bury my head in the sand in woe once I found this out with great lamentations - in fact, it was nice to finally figure out what actually happened and that sometimes things are as simple as they seem.

The truth set me free Glenn - and all you need for it to do the same to you is follow the facts.

Greg Biggs