The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

This icon represents the Union forces serving under General Smith, who retreat ignobly in the face of a charge by a much smaller Confederate unit led by Lieutenant Backhouse. It's not clear how large Smith's unit is, but it includes the "outpost" that Backhouse attacks, a "main unit," and a troop of "cavalry" who screen the retreat (692).

Braxton Bragg was a Confederate general who commanded the Army of Tennessee. Colonel Sartoris' troop is, Bayard notes, fighting under his command in that state (674), and Philip Backhouse's uncle is on "Bragg's personal staff" (693).

Ab (Abner) Snopes is the founding father of the Snopes family, the prolific clan that appears in many of Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha fictions. Neither Granny (in person) nor Bayard (in his narration) treat him with any respect. Bayard's description of "the stubbly dirt-colored fuzz on his face" indicates Ab's lowest (white) class status (684). Even though he's bringing Granny an urgent warning, he goes around to the back of the Sartoris mansion because he knows "he better not come to Granny's front door" (674).

According to Ab Snopes, "there aint a white lady between [Yoknapatawpha] and Memphis" who doesn't follow Mrs. Compson's example in order to protect her family's "silver" from the Yankees (676).

In time the commander-in-chief of the Union Army and then President of the U.S., Ulysses S. Grant was in the early 1860s in charge of the campaign against Mississippi, especially Vicksburg. In Bayard's (and Faulkner's) account of the Civil War, it is Grant himself who "issues a general order with a reward" for the capture of Colonel Sartoris (673).

General Lee was the commander of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia.

The "Richmond Editor" mentioned in the narrative is less a character than a way of locating an event: it is in his newspaper office that Jubal Early calls "Joe Wheeler" an "apostate and matricide" for fighting in the American Army during the Spanish-American War (673).

A Confederate General in the Civil War who fought in the war's eastern theater. The essays he wrote for the Southern Historical Society in the 1870s contributed to the myth of the Lost Cause. But he died in 1894, and so could not have made the comment about General Wheeler serving the U.S. in the Spanish-American War that the story quotes him as saying (673).

A cavalry general in the Army of Tennessee during the Civil War who fought in most of the battles in the western theater. He later was a general in the U.S. Army during the Spanish-American War, an act, Bayard says, that "Father" - Colonel Sartoris - "would have called apostate" and which, according to an imagined anecdote, another Confederate general - Jubal Early - condemns Wheeler to hell (673).

"Cousin Philip," as Bayard usually refers to him in the narrative, is a 22-year-old "shavetail" (lieutenant) in General Forrest's Confederate cavalry troop (694). He is born a "Backhouse" - a familiar term for a privy or outhouse - but explains why he cannot change the name by telling Granny and Bayard that the Backhouses include men who fought in both the Revolutionary and Mexican Wars, and who ran for Governor of Tennessee. The narrative presents him as both a genuinely heroic gentleman and a caricature of the typical hero of Civil War romances by authors not named Faulkner.