Abraham Lincoln, the 16th President of the U.S. who led the nation during the Civil War, is mentioned in 10 Yoknapatawpha fictions, almost as many as Robert E. Lee - and more than twice as many as Jefferson Davis, the President of the Confederacy. He never appears in person, and is typically represented from the perspective of one or another former Confederate. In "Wash," Colonel Thomas Sutpen longs to "shoot [Lincoln and General Sherman] down, like the dogs they are" (540).
Old Man Killgrew is a farmer who lives near the Griers in Frenchman's Bend. Although he never appears in person, he is mentioned in all three of the World War II stories about the Grier family. Killigrew is seventy years old, and prosperous enough to have a cook. He hunts foxes the old-fashioned way, which in Faulkner's Mississippi means "squatting on a hill" rather than riding to the hounds (27). His and his wife's deafness means that the Grier sons can stand outside his house and hear his radio reporting on the progress of the war.
Although she has two very different names in the four texts in which she appears, the character of this admirable woman - the last in Faulkner's series of redoubtable elderly women - does not change. As Miss Belle Worsham she appears in "Go Down, Moses" and the chapter with that title in Go Down, Moses, the granddaughter of a man who owned slaves and the daughter of a man who left her a "decaying house" in Jefferson (260, 356). She and the black Mollie Beauchamp grew up together, and remain loyal to each other decades later.
Half a dozen years after publishing the seven stories Bayard Sartoris narrates as The Unvanquished, Faulkner decided to write one more tale in the series. Published in the middle of World War II, "My Grandmother Millard" makes a kind of farce out of two Civil War 'battles' - one a skirmish in front of a "backhouse," i.e. an outdoor toilet; one an invention to enable a dashing young Confederate named "Backhouse" to change his name and marry a beautiful Southern belle.
Narcissa's unnamed dead husband appears in this novel only when the narrator notes that Narcissa lives in "the home of her husband's people" (23). The people are the Sartorises, and her husband is (Young) Bayard Sartoris. He and Horace Benbow are the central characters in Faulkner's first Yoknapatawpha fiction, Flags in the Dust (1929), in which his relationship with Narcissa and his death a year after their marriage are major episodes.
When Eustace Grimm first appears in The Hamlet, he and his wife have just had a "baby born two months ago" (387). No other details, not even the baby's gender, are revealed, but since Eustace's mother is "Ab Snopes' youngest sister" (399), this child deserves a place on the Snopes family tree.
Flem Snopes, the figure at the center of the Snopes trilogy into which this story was interpolated, is not named in the story. It is clearly Flem, however, to whom the narrative refers when it mentions that one of the "tribe" of Snopeses who have "spread and overlapped into Jefferson" is "the president of the Merchants' and Farmers' Bank" and "a local power in Jefferson" (88-89).
No Strothers appear by name in this last volume of the Snopes trilogy, but the description of the "Negro coachman" who wears "a linen duster and one of the Colonel's old plug hats" while driving the "surrey and matched pair" of horses that take "Colonel Sartoris" (i.e. Old Bayard) to and from his bank clearly fits Simon as he is described in Flags in the Dust (174). This is Faulkner's last reference to the family.
Throughout most of the stories in this novel it seems clear that the character whom Bayard refers to as "Mrs. Compson" is married to General Compson, who is off fighting the Civil War until the final story, "Odor of Verbena," when he makes a brief appearance (245). But in "Skirmish at Sartoris," readers are told that the "only husband [Mrs. Compson] had ever had had been locked up for crazy a long time ago" (193), and that cannot be the General. We assume he must be the General's father, perhaps the Quentin Compson who was a Governor of Mississippi.
