The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

There is a Union officer referred to as "the general" in two of the novel's chapters. In "Ambuscade" this man is mentioned by Sergeant Harrison. In "Raid" the signature of the "General Commanding" the "-th Army Corps, Department of Tennessee" results in Rosa Millard going back to Mississippi with a lot more silver, mules and Negroes than she expected (112). Historically, as Faulkner might have expected his readers to know, the Army of Tennessee was commanded first by Ulysses S. Grant and then (after the fall of Vicksburg) by William T. Sherman.

He stands outside the tent to which Rosa Millard, Bayard and Ringo are taken after they cross the river.

The Union soldiers who help Ringo and Bayard drag Rosa Millard and the wagon on shore after they cross the river are identified as a "Yankee patrol" (108).

Bayard spots the corpse of this Union soldier in the river, hanging over the rump of his dead and floating horse after the bridge was blown up. Because he has a horse, he is either an officer or attached to a cavalry unit, but there is no way to tell which is more likely.

Identified only as an "officer," but distinguishable by the "stubble of beard and long streak of blood" on his "little white face," this man warns Rosa Millard that the army is preparing to blow up the bridge (105).

One of the Union soldiers who raid and burn Hawkhurst. He is the one who tries, unsuccessfully, to take Drusilla's horse away from her.

The Union officer who asks Drusilla to convince the Negroes camped out at the river to return to their former owners.

This icon represents the various Union soldiers who are in control of the bridge over the river in Tennessee. The bridge and the areas on both sides of it are full of Union soldiers when Rosa Millard gets there. Some, identified by Drusilla as "a brigade of cavalry" (91) - are holding the crowd of self-emancipated slaves away from the bridge, others are preparing to blow it up, still others are described as "riding up and down the cliff" above the water or bivouacked "down at the water" (108).

On their way to the river, Drusilla, Rosa, Bayard and Ringo have to move through a huge crowd of self-emancipated slaves, trying to make their way to the Union army on the other side of the river. They are described as "men and women carrying babies and dragging older children by the hand, old men and women on improvised sticks and crutches" (102-3). This group is being held away from the bridge by Union soldiers.

This novel includes a number of Union soldiers, individually and in units, some identified by name. But this icon represents the "Yankees" who are not seen directly, the various units who have been destroying railroads and burning plantations across Mississippi and Alabama, including Hawkhurst. They are represented in the text by the ruins they have left behind them. And the resentments. Included in this entry are the men Drusilla refers to when she says she joined John Sartoris's unit as a private in order "to hurt Yankees" (197).