Phenix Gazette

ALEXANDRIA, (D. C.)
MONDAY MORNING, SEPTEMBER 9, 1833

Dinner to Senator Rives at Lewisburg.—Mr. Rives, of the United States Senate, being on visit to the White Sulphur Springs, the citizens of Lewisburg held a meeting on the 24th August, (at which James Withrow, Esq. presided, and E. B. Bailey acted as Secretary,) and appointed a committee to invite Mr. Rives to partake of a public dinner at that place. The invitation was accepted, and the 29th of August fixed as the day on which the dinner should take place.

The last Alleghanian publishes the letter of the committee, and the answer of Mr. Rives. From the former we take the following extract:

Your public life, sir, affords conclusive and satisfactory proof of patriotic devotion to the best interests of your country. It is indeed distinguished by services, which unquestionably give you strong and undeniable claims upon the gratitude of the American people. At the Court of foreign power you have ably and successfully maintained the rights of your government and with equal ability you have subsequently, in the Senate of the United States, triumphantly vindicated the true principles of that government. A friend to the rights of the States, and opposed at all times to any encroachments whatever on those rights, you have yet fearlessly expressed the wild and absurd pretensions of South Carolina, and defended the just authority of the Federal Government. That the Union, at a period of imminent danger, has found in the person of a Virginia senator one of its most enlightened and spirited champions, cannot but be a source of infinite gratification to the discreet and sober minded people of this Commonwealth. Under these circumstances, we feel the most perfect confidence in the opinion, that when your present term of service shall have expired, you will be re-elected without difficulty to the honorable and highly responsible station you now fill with so much credit to yourself, and advantage to the State.

In reply, Mr. Rives says:

Your favorable estimate of the portion of public service it may have fallen to my lot to perform, at home or abroad, fills me with a deep sense of your liberality and kindness. If amid the violence of party spirit to which you refer, I have encountered no small share of vehement denunciation, I find a rich recompense in such testimonies of enlightened and patriotic approbation, as that you now convey.

You say, most truly, that I have been the constant friend of the Rights of the States; and with an unvarying devotion to that cause, it has never, in my humble judgment, been in my power to render it a better service than by my efforts however feeble, to rescue it from those perversions and extravagant pretensions, which, in making it incompatible with the existence of our happy federal Union, and indeed of any organized society whatever, must inevitably have made it an object of distrust and aversion to the patriotic and sober minded people of this country.