There are over a dozen different groups of "Confederate Soldiers" referred to in the fictions. One that appears, with a few differences, in two different texts is the "battered remnant of a Confederate brigade" that retreated through Jefferson after losing a battle in 1864 (Intruder, 49); the "body" of troops who fight Union troops at the Sartoris plantation and retreat through Jefferson, where "a rear-guard action of cavalry" enables the unit to withdraw still further southward (Requiem, 182).
This is the raiding party of Confederate cavalrymen in Flags in the Dust, about twenty men whom General J.E.B. Stuart recklessly leads behind Union lines in quest of coffee; they are described in mythic terms as riding "with the thunderous coordination of a single centaur" (14).
There are over a dozen different groups of "Confederate soldiers" referred to in the fictions. The "Carolina boys" whom Gombault refers to in "The Tall Men" are based on a historical fact: on the night after the first day's fighting at Chancellorsville, while reconnoitering for a possible attack, General Stonewall Jackson was fatally shot by his own troops in the 33rd North Carolina regiment (54).
There are over a dozen different groups of "Confederate Soldiers" referred to in the fictions. The "Appendix" to The Sound and the Fury refers briefly to the "brave and gallant men" who served under General Jason Compson II during the Civil War (330).
In addition to the specific Confederate units who appear in the various stories that make up the novel Go Down, Moses is the abstract representation of these men whom Ike McCaslin imagines he sees when he looks at Lucas Beauchamp (who descends from slaves): "the face of a generation," "the composite tintype face of ten thousand undefeated Confederate soldiers almost indistinguishably caricatured, composed, cold" (104).
There are over a dozen different groups of "Confederate Soldiers" referred to in the fictions. In Absalom! they appear in several different ways. First, as the idealized "figures with the shapes of men but with the names and statures of heroes" whom Rosa Coldfield writes poems about (13): "maimed honor's veterans . . . fathers, husbands, sweethearts, brothers, who carried the pride and the hope of peace in honor's vanguard as they did the flags" (120).
According to Charles Mallison in The Town, Yoknapatawpha's Chickasaw Indians "departed for Oklahoma in 1820" (11). Historically, the Chickasaw were the Indians who inhabited northern Mississippi when the white settlers arrived, and they were 'removed' by government policy to Oklahoma, but not until the 1830s and 1840s.
"Indians had owned it" (90) - in The Hamlet this refers specifically to Houston's land, but historically the Chickasaw Indians occupied most of the land in what became northern Mississippi (including the area in which Faulkner locates Yoknapatawpha). Under the Presidency of Andrew Jackson they were "removed" beyond the Mississippi RIver, and most of the tribe was gone from Mississippi by the mid-1830s.
As Lucas Beauchamp notes in Go Down, Moses, the land that would have been Ike's McCaslin's inheritance was originally acquired from "the Indians back in the old time" (36). In "The Old People" the Indians are specifically identified as Chickasaws. Sam Fathers, himself half-Chickasaw and the son of a chief, refers to the tribe as "the People" (158).
The Chickasaw Indians inhabited northern Mississippi at the time the first white settlers arrived. Historically they were 'removed' across the Mississippi River in the early 1830s, at about the time that Rosa Coldfield in Absalom, Absalom! says that Thomas Sutpen acquired his land "from a tribe of ignorant Indians" (10).
