The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

The county sheriff in this novel is named Watt Kennedy. Described as a "fat, comfortable man" (287), "with little wise eyes like bits of mica embedded in his fat, still face" (420), he investigates the murder of Joanna Burden and pursues Joe Christmas across the countryside (287).

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. Military supplies being stored in Jefferson as part of that campaign provoke the Confederate cavalry raid in which Hightower's grandfather dies (476).

Although he was not a planter before the Civil War but a lawyer, Reverend Hightower's grandfather and namesake owned slaves. He was a "thorn in his [abolitionist] son's side" but fascinated his grandson, who took pride as a boy in his grandfather's military exploits during the Civil War (470). Alive he was a "hale, bluff, rednosed man with the moustache of a brigand chief" (471).

All the novel says about this man is that he was killed in St. Louis by Calvin Burden I in an argument about slavery - though since Calvin is a fierce abolitionist, we can assume this man is pro-slavery.