The two "house servants" who work for Goodhue Coldfield (14), "both women" (42), were legally slaves when he first "came into possession of them" - "through a debt," Mr. Compson says, "not purchase" (66). He "frees" them immediately, but does not give them "their papers of freedom"; instead, he credits the "weekly wage" they earn but don't receive toward their "market value" as slaves, forcing them to work toward their freedom (66). They are "among the first Jefferson negroes to desert and follow the Yankee troops" during the Civil War (66).
The third-person narrator identifies the passengers on the Mississippi riverboats as "gamblers and cotton- and slavedealers" (26). Rosa refers to them as "drunken fools covered with diamonds and bent on throwing away their cotton and slaves before the boat reached New Orleans" (11).
The Chickasaw Indians inhabited northern Mississippi at the time the first white settlers arrived. Historically they were "removed" across the Mississippi River in the early 1830s, at about the time Thomas Sutpen is described (by Rosa Coldfield) as having acquired his land "from a tribe of ignorant Indians" (10).
The architect who designs the mansion and grounds at Sutpen's Hundred is identified as "French," but comes (like the slaves who build the house) from the French Caribbean: "all the way from Martinique" (26). The first time he is mentioned, Miss Rosa's description anticipates the story by six chapters: "that French architect who looked like he had been hunted down and caught in turn by the negroes" - i.e. by the slaves whom, like the architect, are brought to Yoknapatawpha by Sutpen (10).
Thomas Sutpen is a fictional southern Colonel, but several real Confederate officers are mentioned by name in the novel. They have their own entries. This icon represents the larger, anonymous group of men who lead the Confederate Army through the Civil War. Like so many other characters in the novel, they are seen differently from different points of view. In Chapter 1, to Rosa Coldfield, who writes "poems, ode eulogy and epitaph" to many of them, they are "a few figures with the shapes of men but with the names and statures of heroes" (13).
During the Civil War both North and South used "provost marshals" as a kind of military police force behind the lines. The "Confederate provost marshals' men" from whom Goodhue Coldfield is hiding would have arrested him as a draft dodger or compelled him to serve in the military (6).
Sartoris and Sutpen design the flag that the regiment they organize carries off to the Civil War, but it is "sewn together out of silk dresses" by "Sartoris' womenfolks" (63). If Faulkner is being consistent with his other Yoknapatawpha fictions, this group cannot include Sartoris' wife, who died a decade before the War, but could include his mother-in-law, Rosa Millard, who lived on his plantation during the War in the Unvanquished stories, and perhaps his two young daughters, who are mentioned but not named in Flags in the Dust.
Although only a minor character in Absalom, Absalom!, John Sartoris is a major figure in the Yoknapatawpha fictions as a group. As is generally agreed, Faulkner based his character on his own great-grandfather, William Falkner. In this novel he and Sutpen together organize a Confederate regiment at the start of the Civil War; Colonel Sartoris serves as its first commander, until the soldiers vote to replace him with Thomas Sutpen.
Abraham Lincoln, the 16th President of the United States and the Union's leader during the Civil War, was elected to his first term on November 6, 1860.
The man with whom Rosa's aunt "elopes" is a "horse- and mule-trader" (59), an occupation that is usually depicted as disreputable. During the Civil War he "offers his talents for horse- and mule-getting to the Confederate cavalry remount corps," and is captured by Union forces, presumably while trying to steal their horses, and departs the narrative as a prisoner-of-war in Illinois (66).
