The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

There are two references in the "Appendix" to the slaves who lived in Yoknapatawpha before the Civil War. The term "slaves" appears only in reference to the "shiftless slaves" owned by the descendants of the Chickasaw tribe who remain in the region after the Indian Removal (329). But the Compson family, like the other "masters of plantations" in Yoknapatawpha, owned a number of slaves as well (328).

The derisive term "carpetbagger" (derived from the material used to make cheap luggage) refers to Northerners who came into the South after the Civil War; depending on one's politics, they came either to reconstruct or to prey on the defeated South. Faulkner's carpetbaggers tend toward economic, rather than political, influence in Jefferson.

Most scholars assume the General Smith who appears here and also in "The Unvanquished" and "My Grandmother Millard" is Andrew Jackson Smith, who led the Union forces at the Battle of Tupelo in July, 1864. Faulkner had a particular reason to know this Smith: that same summer he led the Union soldiers who burned both Oxford (the original of Jefferson) and Ripley, where among the houses they destroyed was the home of Colonel William Falkner, the author's great-grandfather.

The "Appendix" lists "the oldest names in the county" as "Holston and Sutpen, Grenier and Beauchamp and Coldfield" (330). Alexander Holston was one of the first three white men to settle Yoknapatawpha, but a tavern owner rather than a planter.

According to the Appendix, after the defeat of the South in the Civil War, Jefferson came to be "populated mainly" by "Snopeses" rather than "Compsons" (329). The enterprising, grasping, often unscrupulous members of the Snopes family appear in numerous Faulkner novels; in particular the Snopes Trilogy (1940, 1957, 1959) chronicles their rise from landless poor whites in Frenchman's Bend to positions of status in town.