The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

The "scrip dollar" that replaces Confederate money in Jefferson is "drawn on the United States Resident Treasurer, Yoknapatawpha County" (199). All we see of this functionary in the story is his "neat clerk's hand[writing]" (199), but presumably he is one of the Northerners working in the defeated South for one of the Reconstruction agencies.

After killing the two Burdens, John Sartoris tells his followers that he plans to find the sheriff and "make bond" (208). The office of Sheriff was different from the office of Marshal that is at stake in the election.

Though she figures in the story only in the phrase "Mrs. Holston's porter" (207), the name Holston is one of the oldest in Yoknapatawpha, and hotel where the porter works must be the Holston House, one of the oldest buildings in Jefferson.

According to Bayard, the Negro porter at the Holston House who takes one look at the white men who have assembled in the Square on election day, says "Gret Gawd," and retreats into the hotel is "too old even to be free" (207). Bayard's meaning seems to be that while this man is a newly emancipated slave, he has no interest in joining the group of blacks who do want to vote.

George Wyatt is a former member of Colonel John Sartoris' "troop" (187) and a key ally in his campaign to keep freed blacks from either voting or being elected. The Wyatts whom Faulkner had written about in his earlier fictions, Flags in the Dust and "A Rose for Emily," belong to the town's upper class, but there is no overt indication that George is a member of that family or (other than the fact that he is literate) about his own rank, in society or in the army.

Bayard identifies the "six or eight strange white men" who are in charge of the black men who want to vote as "the Northern white men" (206, 207). Many of the men whom Bayard calls "the Jefferson men, the men that I knew" (206), would undoubtedly have called these strangers "carpetbaggers" (222), the pejorative term coined by the white South to label men who came into the defeated region after the end of the Civil War. The term referred to a kind of luggage made out of the heavy cloth from which rugs were also made.

Bayard calls the former slaves who gather to vote for Cassius Q. Benbow "nigger voters" (204), though in fact they never get to vote. The 15th Amendment to the Constitution, ratified February 3, 1870, guaranteed adult males the right to vote regardless of "race, color or previous condition of servitude," but the story shows how white men used violence and intimidation to deny that right to blacks in Yoknapatawpha.

The men whom the narrative refers to as "the two Burdens from Missouri" (199) would probably be called "carpetbaggers" by the white population of Yoknapatawpha, and are probably officially both agents of the local Freedmen's Bureau. These agencies were set up by the federal government in the defeated South to help the emancipated slaves understand and establish their rights, including (if they were adult males) the right to vote.

The men whom the narrative refers to as "the two Burdens from Missouri" (199) would probably be called "carpetbaggers" by the white population of Yoknapatawpha, and are probably officially both agents of the local Freedmen's Bureau. These agencies were set up by the federal government in the defeated South to help the emancipated slaves understand and establish their rights, including (if they were adult males) the right to vote.

Before the Civil War, Cassius was called "Uncle Cash"; he was enslaved by the Benbow family and worked as their carriage driver (199). He is illiterate. During the War he "run off with the Yankees" (199), but has returned to Jefferson and been appointed "Acting Marshal" by the northerners who are trying to reconstruct the town's government (199).