Submitted by jjoiner@keuka.edu on Tue, 2019-01-08 19:18
Gavin Stevens and his married sister Maggie live in separate parts of the house has been in the Stevens family for at least two generations. Here is the way another occupant of the house - Gavin's nephew, Charles Mallison - explains the living arrangement in a later fiction, The Town (1957), about a slightly earlier time in the family's history: "We were all living with Grandfather then. . . .
At the end of his account of Jackson's history, the narrator provides a list of people "in the roster of Mississippi names": "Claiborne. Humphries. Dickson. McLaurin. Barksdale. Lamar. Prentiss. Davis. Sartoris. Compson" (88). All these are white and male, most are politicians, Claiborne is mentioned elsewhere in the novel, and the last two names on the list belong to characters whom Faulkner created.
Joseph Eggleston Johnston was one of the Confederacy's most senior Generals. Beginning in 1863, he commanded all southern troops in the Department of the West, which included Jackson as well as (imaginatively) Yoknapatawpha.
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 lived in the South but also, according to the narrator, to defend the "principle and right" that "voluntary communities" should shall be "secured from Federal meddling" (86-87). 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.
The "general of the United States army" who briefly governed Jackson in 1863, after the town was burned by Union forces, was named Joseph A. Mower. He served in Sherman's corps during the campaign against Vicksburg (87).
Henry Clay represented Kentucky in both houses of the U.S. Congress during the decades before the Civil War. As a U.S. Senator, he was the architect of the Compromise of 1850 ("Clay's last compromise," 86), which attempted to resolve the national conflict about the spread of slavery westward across the Mississippi.
Ulysses Grant ended the Civil War as the Commander of all Union forces, and soon afterward became the nation's 18th President. At the time he is mentioned in the novel, 1863, he was in command of Army of Tennessee and leading the Union attack on the Confederate stronghold at Vicksburg.
General William Tecumseh Sherman was Ulysses S. Grant's main lieutenant during the campaign against Vicksburg in 1862-1863. As part of that campaign, he led the Union force that captured Jackson and then, rather than garrison the town, burned or otherwise destroyed everything in it of possible military value - an action which military historians usually see as a forerunner of the 'scorched earth' policy he deployed during his March to the Sea at the end of the war.
Mike Fink was both a real person and, as the narrator puts it, "a legend" (83), a figure around whom grew up a rich set of tall tales about the American West in the early republic, when "the West" was still east of the Mississippi. He was known as 'the King of the Keelboaters' - the frontiersmen who used their muscles to propel flat-bottom freight boats on the Mississippi River and its tributaries in the years before steamboats arrived.
The "Jackson women" who sponsored the three-day "Kermis Ball" to raise money for a Confederate monument in 1887 may have belonged to a group like the United Daughters of the Confederacy (87). The term "kermis" refers to an outdoor festival.
