The Confederate as Gallant Knight: The Life and Death of William Downs Farley

The Confederate as Gallant Knight: The Life and Death of William Downs Farley /. Tracy Power One of William Faulkner's memorable, if quite minor, characters is Bayard Sartoris, a young South Carolinian and Confederate staff officer. Known as "Carolina Bayard," to distinguish him from later members of the family with the same name in Mississippi, he appears in the novel Flags in the Dust and is described as "rather a handful, even for Sartorises. Not so much a black sheep as a nuisance all of whose qualities were positive and unpredictable."1 At the outbreak of the Civil War he volunteers just to have something to do and eventually becomes an aidede -camp to Jeb Stuart. While raiding a Federal general's camp to get some coffee in the spring of 1862, Stuart and a small group, including Sartoris, capture an enemy staff officer. When Stuart gallantly offers to capture a mount for his prisoner's comfort, the Federal taunts him in reply: "No gentleman has any business in this war. ... He is an anachronism, like anchovies. General Stuart did not capture our anchovies . Perhaps he will send Lee for them in person?" Sartoris then suddenly spurs his horse back into the enemy camp, yelling "Come on, boys!" and rides into the commissary tent after anchovies, where a cook hidden under the debris shoots him in the back. Stuart's appraisal of "Carolina Bayard," dead at twenty-three, was that "he was a good officer and a fine cavalryman, but that he was too reckless." Faulkner uses this episode to make a point. "What had been a hairbrained prank of two heedless and reckless boys wild with their own youth," he observes, could over the years be transformed by the retelling into "a gallant and finely tragical focal-point to which the history of the race had been raised."2 Even making allowances for literary license, 1 William Faulkner, Flags in the Dust, ed. Douglas Day (New York: Random House, 1973), 12. Flags in the Dust, published in 1973, is the original version of a novel published in 1929, in a much-shortened form, as Sartoris. 2 Ibid., 18, 19, 12. Civil War History, Vol. XXXVII, No. 3, ° 1991 by the Kent State University Press 248CIVIL WAR HISTORY this view may seem overdrawn—and Faulkner's fictional Stuart and Sartoris more caricature than real—until we discover William Downs Farley. Though Farley was probably not the "model" for Sartoris—we do not know if Faulkner ever heard of him—the similarities between the two are striking. Farley, like Sartoris, was a young South Carolinian on Stuart's staff who considered the war a chance for adventure and whose death was unusual to the point of grotesqueness. Unlike Sartoris, however, he was a real man rather than a novelist's invention, and the story of his life and death is even more compelling and incredible because of that fact. Farley was born at Laurens, in upcountry South Carolina, in 1835. "From earliest childhood he betrayed the instincts of the man of genius," observed his friend John Esten Cooke, the popular Southern novelist and a fellow staff officer with Stuart. "Those who recollect him then, declare that his nature seemed composed of two mingled elements—the one gentle and reflective, the other ardent and enthusiastic."3 Equally at home reciting poetry or hunting foxes, Farley was a model Southern gentleman of the nineteenth century. He possessed those characteristics that made Southerners believe they were better than Northerners, what Clement Eaton has called their "finer points of civilization: gracious manners, genuine hospitality, chivalry, gallantry in war, the refinement and taste of their aristocracy, the enjoyment of leisure, a harmony with nature, the art of conversation, and [a] high sense of honor."4 After he graduated from the University of Virginia in 1855, Farley returned to Laurens and practiced law until the fall of Fort Sumter. In May 1861, he enthusiastically volunteered as a private in the 1st South Carolina Volunteers and traveled to the Virginia theater of the war. When his regiment, a six-month unit organized early that year, disbanded in August, Farley then became a scout, joining the staff of Brig...