Surrender of Fort Sumter — Great Rejoicing among the People — Unparalleled Excitement
The interest of our citizens in the exciting events lately occurring in the neighborhood of Charleston, South Carolina, always intense, as manifested by the crowds that have thronged around the bulletin boards of the different newspapers airing the past week, culminated on Saturday evening on the reception of the news of the surrender of Fort Sumter, In one of the wildest, most enthusiastic and irrepressible expressions of heartfelt and exuberant joy on the part of the people generally, that we have ever known to be the case before in Richmond. Nothing else was talked of, or thought of, save the great triumph achieved by the heroic troops of the glorious Southern Confederacy in obliterating one of the Illinois ape’s standing menaces against the assertion of Southern rights and equality.— So far as the opinion of the people is concerned, it would have been much more to the old rail-splitter’s credit had he ordered Anderson to leave Fort Sumter, as an untenable and undesirable place, than to attempt, as he and his coadjutors did, to make the undoubtedly gallant Major the scapegoat of his insiduous and damnable views. We repeat, that had wise counsels prevailed, the old ape would have had all the credit between a graceful leave-taking and an ignominious expulsion at the cannon’s mouth.