In "Appendix Compson," this soldier is described as merely "a shape (a man in khaki)," as seen through Melissa Meek's tear-filled eyes (337). But he picks her up and installs her in a seat when she is overwhelmed by the crowds at the Memphis bus station. Although he is presumably part of the crowd of "soldiers and sailors enroute either to leave or to death" in the Second World War (337), Faulkner reasserts the humanity of those that make up the crowd through this soldier's stateside actions.
The unnamed secessionists with whom Charles Stuart Compson is associated in "Appendix Compson" endeavored to "secede the whole Mississippi Valley from the United States and join it to Spain" (327). The plotters are headed by General James Wilkinson, whose real-life attempts to sell land to Spain were backed by a number of prominent Kentuckians.
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. In "Appendix Compson," the demands of this "New England carpetbagger" against the Compson estate prompt Jason to sell off small sections of his land, thus enabling the Snopeses to "encroach" on his holdings (329).
"Napoleon's marshals," otherwise known as the Marshals of the Empire, are characterized in "Appendix Compson" as a "glittering galaxy of knightly blackguards" (325). Napoleon reinstated the rank of marshal, the highest military rank in France, in 1804, and appointed 26 marshals, 18 of them in one month. These men were notable for reflecting his own preferences, rather than for having reached a given level of accomplishment. Nearly all lived luxurious lifestyles, at least in part due to their newly elevated status.
The "English king" against whom Quentin MacLachan Compson fights in "Appendix Compson" (326) was George II, notable here for putting an end to the Jacobite rebellions regarding succession to the British crown. Compson's homeland in Scotland, Culloden Moor, was the site of the last major Jacobite uprising. After being defeated there by George II's son, many of the Jacobites were executed or (like the first American Compson) fled the country.
The "dispossessed" king for whom in "Appendix Compson" the grandfather of the first Compson in Yoknapatawpha fought (325) is Charles Edward Stuart, who spent most of his life in exile but claimed to be the rightful king of Britain as part of the Jacobite line of Catholic monarchs. His hope of claiming the throne ended in 1746, when the Jacobites were defeated in a final battle in Scotland. Charles himself is perhaps best remembered for a romantic escape through the Scottish countryside after that loss.
The narrator of "Appendix Compson" refers to "the Jew owners of Chicago and New York sweatshops" who manufacture the "fine bright cheap intransigent clothes" that TP wears (343). The stereotypical assumptions about exploitative urban "Jews" betrays a streak of antisemitism that certainly recalls Jason Compson's ethnic prejudices in The Sound and the Fury but that is somewhat shocking in the post-World War Two era of the "Appendix."
The officers of the law in Jason Compson IV's entry in "Appendix Compson" are described from the anxious perspective of his own criminality: when his niece takes the money he's been embezzling, he cannot turn to them for help recovering it without admitting more of his affairs than he cares to, and yet he chafes at paying for a police force that he characterizes as existing in "parasitic and sadistic idleness" (342).
These "wives of the bankers and doctors and lawyers" of Jefferson in "Appendix Compson"- including some who were part of the "old highschool class" with Melissa Meek and Caddy Compson - are very concerned to appear respectable: they keep the racier modern romance novels they check out of the town library "carefully wrapped from view in sheets of Memphis and Jackson newspapers" (333).
The Chickasaw were one of several tribes that were displaced by President Jackson's Indian Removal Act of 1830. In "Appendix Compson," Faulkner indicates the enduring consequences of that removal, referring to the Chickasaw people in Oklahoma as "the homeless descendants of the dispossessed" (326).
