General Thomas Jackson - better known as Stonewall Jackson, a nickname he earned in the first major battle of the Civil War - was a corps commander in Lee's Army of Northern Virginia. He is mentioned in eight of the fictions. What Mr. Compson in Absalom! calls Jackson's "ruthless tactical skill" was demonstrated in a number of battles (223), including the 1862 campaign "in the [Shenandoah] Valley" referred to in Go Down, Moses (274), when he successfully thwarted three Union armies. His high status among the whites in Yoknapatawpha is attested to in several ways.
A Union general named Smith is mentioned in four of the Yoknapatawpha fictions. His first name never appears. There were two Union Generals named Smith who fought Confederate Nathan Bedford Forrest in Mississippi at various times after the fall of Vicksburg. General William Sooy Smith was defeated by Forrest on February 22, 1864 in the Battle of Okolona, and did in fact fight Forrest "up and down the road to Memphis" - as Faulkner's General Smith does in "The Unvanquished" and again in the novel with that name (79, 128).
General William T. Sherman was a Union general during the Civil War who led troops in battles that ranged from the Mississippi River to the Atlantic Ocean. His service in the war's western theater partially accounts for the fact that his name is mentioned in 8 different fictions - and he himself, according to Faulkner's mythical history, was in Yoknapatawpha at least once: "Wash" notes that Sutpen's slaves emancipated themselves by following in the wake of the Union forces when "Sherman passed through the plantation" (537).
Robert E. Lee, the most famous of the generals who led the Confederate forces during the Civil War, is mentioned in 11 different Yoknapatawpha fictions. For most of the war he was in command of the Army of Northern Virginia, where the Confederate regiment mustered in Jefferson was fighting, but at the beginning of 1865, the last year of the war, he was appointed General-in-Chief of the Confederate States Army. He never appears in person.
The Confederate General whom Ringo and Bayard take turns playing in "Ambuscade" and again in The Unvanquished, John Pemberton, was a historical figure. A career Army officer born in the North, Pemberton decided at the start of the Civil War to serve in the Confederate army - in part because he had married a southerner and in part because he had lived in the South for many years. He was in command of Vicksburg during Grant's 1862-1863 campaign against that river town, and surrendered it to the Union forces on the Fourth of July, 1863.
On the list of Civil War military leaders that appears in Requiem for a Nun, there are "two Johnstons" (188). There were actually three Confederate Generals named Johnston, but it's likely that Faulkner is thinking of Joseph, who has his own character entry, and Albert S. Johnston, who was killed early in the War but not, according to the narrative, before he would have heard the Confederates' "shrill hackle-lifting yelling" during the fighting (188). (The other possibility is the less famous Robert D. Johnston. Only 'Joe' Johnston appears in other fictions.
The historical figure General Joseph Johnston - often referred to as Joe - is mentioned in seven Yoknapatawpha fictions, though he doesn't appear in any of them. For much of the Civil War he was in charge of Confederate forces in the western theater, which included Mississippi.
Ulysses Grant ended the Civil War as the Commander-in-Chief of all Union forces, and soon afterward became the nation's 18th President. He never appears directly in the Yoknapatawpha fictions, but is mentioned in ten of them, always in connection with his leadership of the Union Army of Tennessee during and after the Vicksburg Campaign of 1862-1863. The reference to him in Sanctuary says he "came through the county" of Yoknapatawpha during that period (8; see also "Lizards in Jamshyd's Courtyard," 136).
The historical figure Earl Van Dorn was a Major General who led Confederate forces during much of the fighting in Mississippi until he was murdered in 1863 by a man claiming that Van Dorn was having an affair with his wife. On 20 December 1862 he led a successful attack on General Grant's military supplies at Holly Springs, Mississippi, which was relocated by Faulkner to Jefferson in the novel Light in August, where it becomes the event in which Reverend Hightower's grandfather is killed.
Mentioned in "Raid" and "Skirmish at Sartoris," and again in The Unvanquished, Gavin Breckbridge was engaged to Drusilla before the Civil War, which means it is almost certain that he belonged to the upper class. He never appears directly in Faulkner's fiction, but his death while fighting for the Confederacy at the Battle of Shiloh in 1862 marks the moment when Drusilla - as Bayard puts it in "Skirmish" and again in the novel - "deliberately tried to unsex herself" (60, 189).
