The Fairfield Herald

[From the Raleigh Sentinel]

The Closing Scene of the North Carolina Convention.

At 12 o'clock on yesterday the animals were turned loose and dispersed to their native jungles--except the imported beasts, which were sent to the temporary coverts which they have selected. All the white women and children in this city were kept indoors on yesterday, for fear of the consequences involved by unmuzzling such a motley horde. They can venture out this morning, as perhaps the last of the mongrels has either disappeared from our midst or is only skulking around in the purlieus, harmless and contemptible. The asinine Tourgee, the greasy Watts, the lantern-jawed Ashley, the well-fed Welker, the ravishing May, the nondescript Rodman--are all gone; the air is purer, the streets are cleaner, and the community is happier.

We learn that the closing proceedings of this infamous assemblage were even more discreditable, if that were possible, than any of those which preceded it and which have brought a disgrace upon the Hall of House of Commons, that will render it an unfit place for decent men to assemble in for some time to come. Let all the disinfectants known to the Pharmacopeia be brought into requisition at once, to purify and to cleanse the infected room. Let the windows be kept open, so that the Spring breezes can have free and gentle play through the polluted arches.

In the barbarous regions of Africa, it is the custom, when human sacrifices are to be made and bloody rites celebrated--when bestial appetites are to be gorged and brutal lusts gratified--for the savages to form a ring and dance in demoniac glee around the intended victims. This African assemblage closed its session in the genuine and appropriate African style. One looking into their hall at midnight of Monday, and beholding the scene then and there transpiring, might well have imagined that he had been suddenly transported into the regions of which Livingstone gives us an account. The victim was ready--the sacred old Constitution of our fathers, under which we have lived and prospered--and the savages gathered around it, negroes and scalawags, hand in hand, and danced and sung boisterous and ridiculous melodies. This is no metaphor. It is literal fact, and will bring a blush of shame to the cheek of every true North Carolinian, that the good and honest old State has come to such pass--that a set of apes and hybrids should be holding a brutal carnival in her halls of legislation and shocking decency, propriety and civilization by their impious and drunken orgies.

Pretty much the same scenes were re-enacted, just before the final adjournment, on yesterday. We learn that, after the business of the body was finished, speeches were called for from outsiders. A Gen. Littlefield, (a New York Broker or Agent of Wall Street,) and, perhaps, others, responded in strains of glorification over the murdered remains of civil liberty in North Carolina, and the excessive taxation of an impoverished people. This Gen. Littlefield sang, we understand from near the Speaker's Chair--the seat of Macon and Stanley--from a book of odes, the disgusting melody, "Old John Brown's soul is marching on," or something of that sort, lining it out to the Convention and the negro auditors, who joined in the refrain with boisterous ululation.--Great Heaven!--Have we come to this? What words are adequate to express the horror and shame of good men at such infamous exhibition? What words can paint the evils, the depravity, the ignominy that must result from the rule of such men?

It is needless to add that the Conservative members all left in disgust before these shameful scenes. It has given us deep pain, for the sake of old North Carolina, to record these things; but it is due to history that we should mention them--due to the people in all parts of the State, to tell them what sort of men they allowed, through their indifference, to come up here to make a Constitution for them--due to all, that we consider it our duty to denounce these things, that all lovers of the State may be aroused to effort to put down a "Constitution," conceived in such a spirit and framed by such travesties upon legislators and men. With this view we shall give to-morrow, if possible, a graphic resume of the details of these disgraceful occurrences.