Lawrenceville, New Jersey, United States
Charles Henry Smith attended the Lawrenceville Academy
Athens, GA 30602, United States
In 1844, Charles Henry Smith enrolled at Franklin College (now the University of Georgia).
Lawrenceville, New Jersey, United States
Charles Henry Smith attended the Lawrenceville Academy
Athens, GA 30602, United States
In 1844, Charles Henry Smith enrolled at Franklin College (now the University of Georgia).
https://www.amazon.com/Philosophy-Pendente-Historic-Domestic-Pastorial/dp/B00MG43IBG/?tag=2022091-20
1884
https://www.amazon.com/Farm-Fireside-Sketches-Domestic-Peace/dp/1011364220/?tag=2022091-20
1891
https://www.amazon.com/School-History-Georgia-Georgia-1733-1893/dp/1297947681/?tag=2022091-20
1893
(Published in 1902, this is the story of the life of Bill ...)
Published in 1902, this is the story of the life of Bill Arp of Georgia during and after the War Between the States and his service as an officer in the Confederate States Army.
https://www.amazon.com/Bill-Arp-Uncivil-Date-1861-1903/dp/1453834389/?tag=2022091-20
1903
humorist journalist politician writer
Charles Henry Smith was born on June 15, 1826, at Lawrenceville, Georgia, United States. He was the son of Asahel Reid Smith, a native of Vermont, and Caroline Ann Maguire Smith, whose father had emigrated from Dublin, Ireland, and settled in Georgia.
Smith attended the Lawrenceville School and the Gwinnett County Manual Labor Institute that his father had helped found where he worked to pay his board. In 1844, he enrolled at Franklin College (now the University of Georgia). He left college a few months short of graduating to help his ailing father run his store.
In 1849, Smith began studying law in the office of his father in law, Nathan Lewis Hutchins, a wealthy lawyer and planter in Gwinnett County, Georgia and in 1851 he was admitted to the bar in Lawrenceville. Later in 1851, Smith and his wife moved to Rome, Georgia. He became a city alderman in 1861 but left office a few months later to join the Confederate Army reaching the rank of Major on the staff of Colonel Francis Bartow. After Bartow’s death at Manassas, Major Smith was assigned to the staff of General George T. Anderson. In 1863 Smith received an appointment from Confederate President Jefferson Davis for special judiciary duty, serving as Judge Advocate General of the military court in Macon, Georgia. Returning to Rome following the war, Smith was elected to the state Senate in 1865, and in 1868 became Mayor of Rome.
In response to a presidential proclamation ordering "southern rebels" to "disperse and retire" in 1861, Smith wrote a pointed and satirical letter to "Mr. Linkhorn, Sur." At the request of his friend, Bill Earp, a typical Georgia cracker, Smith published the letter under the name "Bill Arp." This letter and dozens that followed during the war and reconstruction made Bill Arp a household name across the South. In 1877 Smith retired from law and moved his growing family to "Fontainbleu" a farm on the outskirts of Cartersville on the Tennessee Road, now Highway 411. Ten years later, Smith moved into town to a home he called "The Shadows" on North Erwin Street. At the invitation of Henry Grady, editor of The Atlanta Constitution, in 1878, Smith began writing a column that, at its peak, was syndicated to hundreds of papers across the South, and a few places north. Painting scenes of life on the farm and at home, Bill Arp’s weekly columns struck a chord with post-war Southerners and helped ease their reconciliation with the New South. In addition to his columns, Smith wrote five books, Bill Arps Letters, Bill Arps Scrapbook, The Farm and Fireside, History of Georgia and From the Uncivil War to Date.
About 1877, giving up the practice of law, he moved to "Fontainebleau," his farm near Cartersville, Ga. Eleven years later he moved into Cartersville, where he spent the rest of his life in study and writing.
For over twenty-five years Charles Henry Smith contributed to the Atlanta Constitution weekly letters, which were reprinted in Home and Farm, the Sunny South (Atlanta), and other papers. He was famous for books: Bill Arp's Scrap Book (1884), The Farm and Fireside (1891), and Bill Arp: From the Uncivil War to Date (1903). His works were signed "Bill Arp", written in the illiterate dialect employed by many early American humorists.
(Published in 1902, this is the story of the life of Bill ...)
1903Smith wrote almost thirty more Arp letters for southern newspapers, attacking Union policies, praising the Confederacy, and describing in a humorous fashion his family's experiences as refugees ("runagees," he called them) while fleeing from advancing Federal troops in 1864. Arp later criticized the nation's Reconstruction policies in letters that often expressed a good bit of frustration, even anger.
Like many prominent white Southerners during the Reconstruction era, Charles Henry Smith was nostalgic for the Old South and hostile to black equality. He criticized African-American education in the South and in some columns endorsed lynching of blacks to enforce white supremacy. He supported the disenfranchisement movement of the late 1890s, arguing that Southern blacks were not capable of casting an intelligent vote.
Quotations:
"But I'm a good Union man, so-called. I ain't agwine to fight no more, I shan't vote for the next war. I ain't no gorilla. I've done tuk the oath, and I'm gwine to keep it, but as for my being subjugated, and humilyated, and amalgamated, and enervated, as Mr. Chase says, it ain't so--nary time. I ain't ashamed of nuthin neither - ain't repentin - ain't axin for no one-horse, short-winded pardon. Nobody needn't be playin priest around me. I ain't got no twenty thousand dollars. Wish I had; I'd give it to those poor widders and orfins. I'd fatten my own numerous and interestin offspring in about two minits and a half. They shouldn't eat roots and drink branch-water no longer. Poor, unfortunate things! to cum into this subloonary world at sich a time. There's four of five of 'em that never saw a sirkis nor a monkey - show - never had a pocket-knife, nor a piece of cheese, nor a resin."
"My friends, our aim has onestly been to git you all back into the Union... Up to this time it have been an uphill business. The teem was a good one, and the gear all sound, and the waggin greased, but the rode is perhaps the ruffest in the world."
Charles Henry Smith was a man both witty and tolerant, and his lovable personality appears plainly in his writings. Through lecture tours, he widened his circle of friends and won for himself the title of "the best-loved man in all the Southland". The outspoken courage and the vigor of his satire are blended with good-humored tolerance.
Quotes from others about the person
"In the dark days, he kept southern hearts from breaking." - The Savannah Press
In 1849 Charles Henry Smith married Mary Octavia Hutchins, daughter of Judge Nathan L. Hutchins, of Lawrenceville. Mary Octavia, who outlived her husband, gave him ten children.
