Charles Henry Smith wrote more than 2,000 humorous letters under the pseudonym "Bill Arp" between 1861 and 1903, most of which were published in Southern newspapers such as the Atlanta Constitution . "Bill Arp" joined Charles Farrar Browne's "Artemus Ward," David Ross Locke's "Petroleum V. Nasby," and Henry Wheeler Shaw's "Josh Billings" as one of a new breed of humorists produced by the Civil War period, literary comedians whose timely epistles and lectures made capital of the comic misspellings, misquotations, caricatures, and twisted literary dialect of an illiterate persona. Carrying on the humorous tradition of a cracker-barrel philosopher writing a letter to the editor of a local newspaper--a tradition including Benjamin Franklin's "Silence Dogood" and James Russell Lowell's "Hosea Biglow"--Smith's Bill Arp expressed what he himself called "the silent echoes of our people's thoughts" during the turbulent era of the Civil War, Reconstruction, and into the twentieth century. Bill Arp's inspiration...