The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

During Reconstruction, according to the Cass Edmonds' image of it, the lynched "bodies of white and black both" hung "from lonely limbs" along the road and black men were "shot dead in polling-booths" while trying to vote - victims, still according to Cass' representation, "not so much of hate as of desperation and despair" (277).

As part of the narrative's account of Reconstruction in the South, the white men "armed in sheets and masks" who terrorize freed blacks are described (277). The details of the description suggests the Ku Klux Klan, especially "formalized regalia of hooded sheets" and "fiery christian symbols" (276), but this group is never given a label. And astonishingly, the narrator suggests that its original founders were the descendants of the carpetbaggers from the North, lynching "the race their ancestors had come to save" (276).

As part of his description of Reconstruction in the South, Ike McCaslin imagines "women crouched with huddled children behind locked doors," seeking shelter from threats that are not named in the text, but are clearly meant to be understood as a consequence of the defeat of the (white) South and the emancipation of the (black) South (277).

The "carpet-bagger followers of victorious armies" (265) and their descendants, the men who did not fight in the Civil War but merely profited from it, are mentioned several times in Go Down, Moses, by the narrator and by McCaslin Edmonds. They are defined by “a single fierce will for rapine and pillage” (276).

In his conversation with Cass about human, and specifically Southern history, Ike generalizes about a number of different kinds of men who, according to his account, were part of the explanation for the Civil War. This entry refers to what he calls "the thundering cannonade of politicians earning votes and the medicine-shows of pulpiteers earning Chautauqua fees" (270) - by which he means the political men and popular orators who campaigned and spoke against slavery.

In his conversation with Cass about human, and specifically Southern history, Ike generalizes about a number of different kinds of people who, according to his account, were part of the explanation for the Civil War. This entry refers to what he calls "the Boston-bred (even when not born in Boston) spinster descendants of long lines of similarly-bred and likewise spinster aunts and uncles whose hands knew no callus except that of the indicting pen" - by which he means northern abolitionist writers (273).

In his conversation with Cass about human, and specifically Southern history, Ike generalizes about a number of different kinds of men who, according to his account, were part of the explanation for the Civil War. This entry refers to what he calls "the wildcat manipulators of mythical wilderness townsites" (273). ("Wildcat" is a term used to characterize investments or trades or other financial transactions that are highly risky - and typically fraudulent .)

In his conversation with Cass about human, and specifically Southern history, Ike generalizes about the kinds of men who, according to him, were responsible for the Civil War. This entry refers to what he calls "the narrow fringe of traders and ship-owners still looking backward across the Atlantic and attached to the [American] continent only by their-counting houses" (273). He means the business men who made money from the slave and cotton trade with Africa and Europe.

Ike divides the North during the Civil War era into the capitalist class and the workers. That second group is who is represented by this entry: "the New England mechanics who didn't even own land," the factory workers who lived in "rented tenements," and so on (273).

In his conversation with his cousin Edmonds, Ike refers to the "wives and daughters" of the plantation owners who fed and nursed their sick slaves both in "their stinking cabins" and, "when they were very sick," in "the big house itself" (271).