Gen. Beauregard’s Demands Respecting Fort Sumter—Demands Respecting Fort Sumter—Distress in the City.
The Charleston (S. C.) correspondent of the New York Tribune writes on the 19th instant:
The long expected orders from Washington have not yet arrived at Fort Sumter. It is earnestly hoped by the Union men here that the Government will, if possible, sustain Major Anderson in his position. A struggle seems imminent in any case, for Gen. Beauregard has distinctly stated in the hearing of intimate friends of mine, that the fort shall be surrendered to him and not evacuated; that he shall not be satisfied unless Major Anderson delivers into his hands his sword. He also says that no United States vessel shall enter the harbor until his officers have searched it, and is talking large generally.
A force of 1,000 well-trained men in the City of Charleston would blast the whole concern; and hundreds of working-men with true hearts and hard hands, would immediately rally from all parts of the State if the Stars and Stripes are once again unfurled. Every humane man must deprecate war; but it Is worse than war to see the honor, the freedom, and fair fame of one’s country trodden into the dust by these traitorous hordes.
I can not give you a better idea of the position to which the white laboring man has been reduced from the effects of this rebellion, than by assuring you that the few laboring men who are so fortunate as to be retained in the employ of the South Carolina Railway Company, are now receiving the extraordinary sum of fifty cents per day for their labor.
One of their number told me this morning that his wages had been gradually reduced from $2 to seventy-five cents a day, but that when it got below that he left, and with his small saving, as a last resource, established a whisky shop. Daily applications are made to the Foreign Societies here, begging them to send whole families away to the North ; and the distress is increasing daily and with rapid strides. Meantime provisions are steadily increasing in- price, and the season is gradually crawling toward the time when disease as well as want will make sad havoc among the poor.
Cincinnati Daily Press, Cincinnati, OH