Go Down, Moses introduces the character it calls "the Jew" into its account of the Reconstruction era in the South. According to that account, "the Jew" arrives in the post-Civil-War South "seeking some place to establish" for his "great-grandchildren"; he is the local type of the "pariah" who was wandered "about the face of the Western earth" for "twenty centuries" (277). The narrator credits him with "a sort of courage," but he remains an essentially stereotypical figure, one of the outsiders who move into the defeated South as parasites (277).
Sickymo was a U.S. marshal in Jefferson during Reconstruction, a period in which more than 2,000 African-Americans - many of them, like Sickymo, former slaves - held public office. Because he is illiterate, he "signs his official papers with a crude cross" (277).When still a slave, he stole alcohol, diluted it, and stored it in a sycamore tree in order to sell it - hence his name. His character and tenure in office are referred to in Go Down, Moses as an instance of the evils that befell the defeated (white) South after the loss of the Civil War.
Sally Rand was a minor actress and nightclub dancer who became famous at the 1933 Chicago World's Fair when she danced apparently naked, using a pair of ostrich feather "fans" to reveal and conceal her body in provocative ways that got her arrested four times in one day (323).
George Meade was given command of the Army of the Potomac just three days before the battle of Gettysburg, site of the charge by Pickett's confederate troops which proved to be a decisive defeat for the Confederate cause. In Go Down, Moses, Cass is referring to that defeat when he notes, somewhat obscurely, that Jeb Stuart and his cavalry troops were not at the battle, "when Lee should have known of all of Meade just where Hancock was on Cemetery Ridge" (272).
Jonas, one of the slaves on the McCaslin plantation when it was owned by Buck and Buddy, appears once in Go Down, Moses in the familiar pose of the 'lawn jockey': "Jonas had the two horses saddled and waiting" (9).
In Go Down, Moses Hulett works for the Chancellor at the Jefferson courthouse, whom Roth Edmonds and Mollie Beauchamp visit regarding a petition for divorce for the Beauchamps. He makes several sharp remarks concerning racial decorum and Lucas’s "uppity" failure to observe it (124).
General Winfield Scott Hancock, whom Cass Edmonds mentions in Go Down, Moses as part of his argument with Ike McCaslin about God's role in Southern history (271), was a corps commander in the Army of the Potomac, and as Cass notes, "on Cemetery Ridge" at Gettysburg (272).
In the 4th section of "The Bear" chapter in Go Down, Moses, during his long conversation with his cousin Cass about the history of the world with particular reference to the Old and New South and Ike's own belief that he must relinquish his inheritance from the past, Ike has a lot to say about God - as both the author of the Bible and the providential force behind human events. Ike most frequently refers to this divinity as "He," always capitalizing the H (243, etc).
