Gentlemen:—I have the honor to acknowledge the receipt of your very kind and complimentary letter of the 21st inst. inviting me to a public dinner to be given to the "Tombigby Volunteers," who have recently returned from Mexico. The prospect of meeting my many kindly remembered friends of your vicinity, would at any time create in me the most pleasing anticipations, but on the present occasion such anticipations are more than ordinarily excited by the very gratifying terms of your invitation, and the opportunity you offer of meeting embodied, perhaps, for the last time, those of my brethren in arms appropriately termed by you, "the remnant of that gallant corps the Tombigby Volunteers." Circumstances deprive me of the pleasure of being with you in person on this occasion, and of enjoying the proud satisfaction of seeing you bestow upon my late comrades the only reward which they ever could have expected, the only incentive worthy of their conduct: the gratitude of their fellow citizens, the approval of those whom they especially represented in their country's service, the "well done" of those whose good name was entrusted to their keeping.
Through you gentlemen of the committee, permit me to return my thanks to your fellow citizens of Lowndes County, for their flattering attention, and to express the sincere regret I feel at not having been able to accept their invitation. To you for the kind and most pleasing terms in which you have addressed me, I am deeply obliged.
With sincerest regard I remain
SOURCE: Dunbar Rowland, Editor, Jefferson Davis, Constitutionalist: His Letters, Papers and Speeches, Volume 1, p. 85-6
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