In "Retreat" and again in The Unvanquished, Louvinia mentions "Unc Few Mitchell" to help Bayard and Ringo appreciate the performance Colonel Sartoris puts on for the Union troops who had ridden up to the plantation in search of him. According to her, he was "born loony" (34, 73). From the way she talks about him, it seems very likely that he is another enslaved person on the Sartoris plantation, but that is not explicitly said.
In The Unvanquished - in a passage added to the original story "Raid" - Ringo sleeps in "Missy Lena's cabin" at Hawkhurst; she is undoubtedly a slave on the plantation, but does not appear in the novel herself (99). If her name was given her by the whites who owned her, as was probably the case, Missy Lena is likely a corruption of "Messalina," the wife of the Roman emperor Claudius; in Faulkner's fiction as in southern history, slave names were often a mock-heroic version of classical ones.
The "Hilliard at the livery stable" in The Unvanquished Oxford is presumably the owner who lets Ringo talk him out of a good horse for his long ride (217).
In The Unvanquished Mr. Habersham works in a "little dim hole" in a bank (220). He obeys his wife's command and signs John Sartoris' peace bond. (The Habersham family figures in Faulkner's fiction among the founders of Yoknapatawpha, but the married couple in this novel are not specifically associated with that larger narrative.)
The John Sevier mentioned by Aunt Jenny in The Unvanquished was a frontiersmen whose adventures made him a hero "to small boys or fool young women" (244).
The "David Crockett" whom Aunt Jenny mentions in The Unvanquished is much better known as Davy (244). He was a frontiersman, U.S. Congressman and soldier. His death among the Americans at the Alamo in 1836 ensured him a spot in the annals of American lore.
The historical figure William Barksdale, mentioned in The Unvanquished, was born in Tennessee but was serving as Congressman from Mississippi at the start of the Civil War. He resigned that office to fight for the Confederacy. He participated in many battles in Virginia and was mortally wounded at the Battle of Gettysburg in July 1863.
This anomalous 'character' does not appear in either the magazine or book versions of "Vendee." But in the typescript for the story Faulkner included a passing reference to the techniques used by "headhunters" in Borneo that Bayard read about and that he and Ringo apparently employ in skinning Grumby after they succeed in killing him (115). In his edition of the story for Uncollected Stories, Joseph Blotner restores this passage to the text, and so the "headhunters" become an entry in our database.
All we know about this Confederate brigade commander mentioned in The Unvanquished is that when John Sartoris returns to Mississippi after being demoted by his troops, "Uncle Buddy" McCaslin apparently stays behind as a sergeant "in Tennant's brigade in Virginia" (51).
While most of the former slaves in Faulkner's fiction remain with the white families that owned them before the Civil War (for example, Ringo, Louvinia and Joby in this story), several of the fictions acknowledge the hundreds of thousands of enslaved blacks who simply left the plantations to quest for freedom by following the Union armies as they moved through the South.
