Thomas Hinds was a hero of the War of 1812 who afterward commanded the Mississippi territorial militia. After Mississippi gained statehood in 1817 he turned to politics, serving in the state legislature and later in the U.S. Congress. In 1821, along with James Patton and William Lattimore, he was one of the "three Commissioners" who chose the site for the new state capital (79).
According to the narrator, "Negro leaders developed by" the several Negro colleges that were established in Jackson after Emancipation "intervened" in some way when Federal troops drove Governor Humphreys out of office "in 1868" (87). Negro colleges were a major source of leaders for the African American community during the 19th century; however, the event described by the narrator is historically impossible, since none of the Negro colleges he mentions - Tougaloo, Jackson and Campbell - were in existence before 1869, as the dates provided in the novel itself make clear.
Benjamin Humphreys (Faulkner misspells his name) was a Southern officer during the Civil War who turned to politics during Reconstruction. In October, 1865, he was elected Governor of Mississippi as a Democrat. As an unpardoned Confederate he was ineligible to serve by the terms of surrender, so he had himself inaugurated and sworn in. In June, 1868, Federal troops were used forcibly to remove him from office. He was a strong advocate of Jim Crow laws as a way to deny freed slaves their rights as citizens.
During the Civil War, Egglestone was a Union General. After the war he settled in Mississippi as a planter, and in 1868 was elected Governor of the state as a Republican by the constitutional convention held in Jackson. But since Mississippi had not yet been re-admitted to the Union, he never served in that office. To unreconstructed Mississippians, he was a carpetbagger, which explains why they gave him the sobriquet "Buzzard" (87).
Jefferson Davis was the only President of the Confederate States of America. During the last dozen or so years before his death in 1889, he delivered a number of speeches defending the South's decision to secede.
The "country club" in Yoknapatawpha is mentioned when Temple sums up, with some bitterness, the life she and Gowan led after their marriage: one of the fashionable elements in it was "a country club with a country club younger set of rallying friends" with whom to drink on Saturday nights (124). She gives no indication of the club's location, so the place we have assigned it on the map is entirely speculative.
At least one of the Scenes in the three-act drama in Requiem for a Nun are set in the Jefferson apartment where Gowan and Temple Stevens live. Faulkner's stage direction describes the apartment building as "an old house, an ante-bellum house," that has been cut up into apartments and "modernized"; the living room where Act I, Scene II, occurs is "smart, modern, up-to-date," but also expressing "the air of another time" (41). There is some confusion, however, about this setting. Later Temple herself says that "the Gowan Stevenses" live in "a new bungalow on the right [i.e.
In his account of the changes that progress brings to Yoknapatawpha, the narrator mentions that most tenant farms have disappeared along with the mules as workers on tractors cultivate larger tracts of land. This icon represents the few "forty- and fifty- and sixty-acre hill farms inaccessible from unmarked dirt roads" that still exist in the poorest parts of the county (193).
