As the young Thomas Sutpen moves east across Virginia in Absalom!, he notes these "white men" on "fine horses" (182), the "white men who superintend the work" of the field slaves (184).
In her account in Absalom! of the men who begin returning home from the Civil War during its final winter, Rosa refers to the men's "beloved wife or mistress who in his absence has been raped" (126). She does not say by whom.
The "chosen young girls in white dresses bound at the waist with crimson sashes" whom Shreve imagines in Absalom! are decked out for a "Decoration Day" ceremony "fifty years" after Bon's June visit to Sutpen's Hundred (262). "Decoration Day" is better known as "Confederate Memorial Day," out of which the U.S. Memorial Day holiday eventually came. It was first observed soon after the Civil War ended, and in fact is still unofficially observed in some places in the South - in April, however, not "June" (262).
During the last winter of the Civil War, Rosa says in Absalom!, "stragglers" frequently passed by the Sutpen plantation where she, Judith and Clytemnestra lived. Some she says were "tramps, ruffians," but others were "soldiers beginning to come back" from the war, "men who had risked and lost everything" (126). Right after the passage mentions the "wife or mistress" of such men "who in [their] absence has been raped," Rosa adds: "We were afraid," but "we fed them" (126).
Absalom!'s third-person narrator identifies the passengers who travel 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 justice's court" in which Charles E. S-V. Bon is arraigned in Absalom! is described as "crowded" (163); "every face in the room" looks at the prisoner at the moment when the justice himself asks him "What are you?" (165).
In Absalom! Rosa Coldfield mentions the "many Southern gentlemen and gentlewomen" who are members of "the literary profession" (5). She does not name any names, but genteel fiction and poetry by Southern authors were staples of the national magazines around the turn into the 20th century.
In Absalom! Henry and Bon enlist and serve in the Confederate company organized at the start of the Civil War by "their classmates at the University" (69). According to Mr. Compson, its men come from across the entire class spectrum: "rich and poor, aristocrat and redneck" (97), and the flag they carry toward the fighting was sewn a few stitches at a time by "the sweetheart of each man in the company" (98).
When in Absalom! the "fathers and mothers and sisters and kin and sweethearts" of the students who are forming themselves into the University Grays travel to Oxford, they bring "food and bedding and servants" (97). 'Servants' is unquestionably a euphemism for 'slaves.'
As the proprietor of the largest plantation in Yoknapatawpha, Sutpen owned a much larger group of slaves than his original twenty slaves from the Caribbean and the additional several slaves whom the narrator specifically refers to. Absalom! notes, for example, that over the years the "wild" Negroes whom Sutpen "had brought into the country" mix with other enslaved Negroes - "the tame which was already there" (67).
