The narrator on "Shall Not Perish" speculates about "the men who would come to Major de Spain after bank-hours or on Sunday to ask to have a note extended" (106-107).
Thinking about the local men killed in the war leads the narrator of "Shall Not Perish" to imagine "all the grieving about the earth, the rich and the poor too" (103): the people who lose loved ones in the fighting.
In "Shall Not Perish" Major de Spain refers to his son's "forefathers [who] fought and died for [their country] then, even though what they fought and lost for was a dream" (108). "Then" is "eighty years ago," and as the word "lost" suggests, the country he is talking about was the Confederacy; these forefathers fought against the United States. (One of them would have been this Major's father, who was a Major in the Confederate Army during the Civil War.) De Spain's unreconstructed attitude explains why he covers his son's coffin with "the Confederate flag" (107).
The narrator of "Shall Not Perish" and his mother tour an art museum in Jefferson that contains "pictures from all over the United States, painted by people who loved what they had seen or where they had been born or lived enough to want to paint pictures of it so that other people could see it too" (110). These works of art, and the people who created them, fuel the Grier boy's imagination.
At the conclusion of "Shall Not Perish," the narrator identifies the group he calls "America": "the men and women who did the deeds . . . who lasted and endured. . . . I knew them too: the men and women . . . still powerful and still dangerous and still coming, North and South and East and West" (115).
In "Shall Not Perish," after Pete died, Res Grier would bring home the Memphis newspaper each time he returned from Jefferson. The Grier family would see the "pictures and names of soldiers and sailors from other counties and towns in Mississippi and Arkansas and Tennessee" who died in spring and summer of 1942 (102). While African American soldiers fought and died during World War II, it is unlikely that during this time of segregation in the South the Memphis paper would have published their pictures.
Describing his family history in "My Grandmother Millard," Philip Backhouse refers to the group that prevented his uncle from being elected Governor of Tennessee as "a corrupt and traitorous cabal of tavern-keepers and Republican Abolitionists" (682). Although Tennessee did secede from the Union and join the Confederacy (the last state to do so), it was deeply divided between secessionists and Unionists.
As the progress of the Civil War brings the Union Army closer to Yoknapatawpha in "My Grandmother Millard," Lucius begins meeting with "Negroes from other plantations," presumably to talk about the possibility of emancipating themselves (669).
According to Ab Snopes in "My Grandmother Millard," "there aint a white lady between [Yoknapatawpha] and Memphis" who doesn't copy the strategy that Mrs. Compson used to try to protect her family's "silver" from the Yankees (676).
The "Richmond Editor" mentioned in "My Grandmother Millard" is less a character than a way of locating an event: it is in his newspaper office that Jubal Early calls "Joe Wheeler" an "apostate and matricide" for fighting in the American Army during the Spanish-American War (673).
