Alexandria Gazette

PUBLIC MEETINGS IN VIRGINIA.

The public meetings that have been held in Virginia on the subject of the Removal of the Deposites, it is agreed on all hands, have exceeded, in numbers, in respectability, and in earnestness, any that have assembled in the State for a long period of time. The names of the gentlemen taking a prominent part in these meetings, show something of the materiel of which they were composed.—Chapman Johnson and Watkins Leigh at Richmond; Colonel William Robertson at Petersburg; Judge Coulter and Judge Lomax at Fredericksburg; General Baldwin and Robert S. Brooke at Staunton; Littleton Waller Tazewell at Norfolk, &c. &c. These are the men who are heading the Constitutional party in Virginia, in nobly resisting Executive encroachments, and endeavoring to maintain the cause of the People and the Republican Institutions of the country.

We are sorry we have not room, at present for the publication of the preamble and resolutions adopted by the Fredericksburg meeting. especially as we have been requested to give them a place. The conclusion to which the meeting arrived, is, however, summed up in the resolution,

" That the removal, under Executive authority, of the deposites of the public money from the Bank of the United States to the State Banks has deranged, most injuriously, the sound and wholesome currency of the country; has been destructive to the trade and commerce and prosperity of the States; was a violation of national faith; was illegal, unconstitutional, arbitrary, and unwarranted."

The meeting at Staunton denounced, in unqualified terms, the removal of the Deposites, as an act unwise, illegal, and unconstitutional; and the resolutions adopted at Petersburg were to the same effect—Mr. Robertson remarking, among other things, that, so far as an assumption of the means of political power may be regarded, no monarch on earth possessed omnipotence in a higher degree than the man to whose elevation as Chief Magistrate of this Republic his vote had twice contributed.

The observation of Mr. Robertson cannot fail to strike the reader, also, as showing that these meetings, or many of them, were composed of General Jackson's former friends—men who have stood by him until the last daring attack upon the liberty of the country, and then indignantly quitted his cause to rank with those contending for principle and virtue.

It is probable that this week and the next we shall have accounts from Leesburg, and other places where meetings have been called, and where it is expected they will be equally numerous and respectable as those which have taken place in other parts of the Commonwealth. We sincerely hope that these exhibitions of public sentiment—these voluntary and warm expressions of public feeling on the part of the citizens of the Old Dominion—will have their proper effect every where, and especially upon their Senators and Representatives in Congress and in the Legislature. As yet, throughout the whole State, we have seen no movement—not the slightest—to sustain the President; and even the Richmond Enquirer! doubts the propriety of the Executive course, both as to time and manner!