While no Union troops appear directly in "Skirmish at Sartoris," either as a story or as a chapter in The Unvanquished, they are referred to at different points by Bayard, his father John, Drusilla and Ringo. Bayard notes that northeastern Mississippi "had been full of Yankees" for three years before they "burned Jefferson" and left the area at the end of 1864 (58, 188). John seems to think that if they returned they would help him and the other white men of Yoknapatawpha restore the order that had been disrupted by the War (65, 198).
These are the Union forces serving under General Smith in "My Grandmother Millard" 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).
These are the first Union troops to appear in Jefferson, according to "My Grandmother Millard": a "Yankee scouting patrol" that was apparently looking for General Compson "over a year ago" (675). That would have been before April, 1861 - implausibly early in the Civil War for Union troops to be moving through Mississippi.
This second set of Yankees described in "My Grandmother Millard" seems to be an irregular, possibly even a renegade group: the "six men in blue" who charge on horseback onto the Sartoris property (676). They are armed with a battering ram because their mission is pillage rather than combat (674). Bayard describes their "faces" as "unshaven and wan" and their demeanor as "frantically gleeful"; their slovenliness suggests a lower class background and their glee an undisciplined lust for plunder (676).
This is the first of the Union units engaged by the narrative of "My Grandmother Millard": the "whole regiment of Yankee cavalry" that, according to Ab Snopes, is "half a mile down the road" from the Sartoris place (674). (A Union regiment could be as large as 1000 men.)
As recounted in Intruder in the Dust, in 1864 these Union troops took control of Jefferson by force and "burned to rubble" the "courthouse and everything else on or in the Square" (48-49). When Requiem for a Nun refers to this same event, it calls the Union troops who did the burning a "United States military force" (37).
Specific Union troops who appear in the various stories that Will Falls and Aunt Jenny tell in Flags in the Dust have their own separate entries in the data. This entry represents the unspecified groups of Union soldiers and officers who are mentioned - often with extreme bias - in the novel. For example, the "drunken Yankee generals [who] set fire to the house your great-great-great-grandfather built" that Aunt Jenny refers to (50).
In both the story and the novel "The Unvanquished," this appears to be the last Union troop that Bayard sees in Yoknapatawpha during the War; it tracks Rosa Millard down to the Sartoris plantation to recover at least some of the dozens of stolen Yankee mules who remain in the county.
In Flags in the Dust and again in "Retreat" both as a short story and as a chapter in The Unvanquished, this company of Union soldiers is captured by Colonel Sartoris. In the first novel he does so single-handedly, but in the next to he has some (involuntary) help from Bayard and Ringo. In those two texts we assume this group is the "column of Yankee infantry" that earlier passes by Bayard and his father's troop hiding in the woods (30, 67).
In "Ambuscade" and again in The Unvanquished, this is the first group of Yankee soldiers to appear in Yoknapatawpha. In "Raid" Louvinia remembers their arrival, and Rosa's note to their colonel identifies them as a regiment from Ohio. To Ringo they look like "the whole [Union] army" (10), but it's more likely they comprise a single regiment of cavalry - or less.
