Robert Rives (1764–1845), merchant and planter, was a native of Sussex County and the father of William Cabell Rives. He served in the Yorktown campaign during the Revolutionary War and later joined the Agricultural Society of Albemarle. By the 1790s his firm of Robert Rives & Company kept a store at Milton, and he was a longtime partner in the Richmond commission house of Brown, Rives & Company. TJ first did business with him in 1795, and he visited his large Nelson County estate, Oak Ridge, in the spring of 1817. At his death Rives owned land in Albemarle, Buckingham, Campbell, and Nelson counties and a personal estate valued at just over $100,000 (Alexander Brown, The Cabells and their Kin, 2d ed., rev. [1939, repr. 1994], 235–46; MB description begins James A. Bear Jr. and Lucia C. Stanton, eds., Jefferson’s Memorandum Books: Accounts, with Legal Records and Miscellany, 1767–1826, 1997, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Second Series description ends , 2:929, 1332; PTJ description begins Julian P. Boyd, Charles T. Cullen, John Catanzariti, Barbara B. Oberg, and others, eds., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 1950– , 31 vols. description ends , 28:365–6, 30:27, 29n; Richmond Enquirer, 14 Mar. 1845; Nelson Co. Will Book, G:103–7, 123–9).

The enclosed invoice, not found, probably billed TJ for William Mitford, The History of Greece, 4 vols. (London, 1808; Sowerby, description begins E. Millicent Sowerby, comp., Catalogue of the Library of Thomas Jefferson, 1952–59, 5 vols. description ends no. 23), and Catharine Macaulay, The History of England from the Accession of James I. to that of the Brunswick Line, 8 vols. (London, 1763–83; Sowerby, description begins E. Millicent Sowerby, comp., Catalogue of the Library of Thomas Jefferson, 1952–59, 5 vols. description ends no. 386), both of which TJ acquired in quarto editions about this time (William C. Rives to TJ, 4 June 1811).