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Hon. A. R. Boteler.

--We copy from the Winchester Virginia the following extract of a letter from this gentleman. He was one of the first to join a volunteer company as a private in the ranks, and march to Harper's Ferry:

In reply to the inquiry contained in your last letter, I have no hesitation in answering that I heartily approve of the recent action of our State Convention, and expect to reiterate my approval at the polls.

You know with what devotion I have loved the Union, how faithfully I labored with those who struggled to maintain it upon its original constitutional basis of justice and equality, and how reluctant I was to abandon the hope of its reconstruction, But, alas! the coercive policy of this perfidious Administration, and the malignant alacrity with which that policy has been responded to by all parties in the North, has abundantly testified that the Union of my love, the Union which our fathers made for our protection, has been perverted by sectional hatred into a weapon of oppression; that it is no longer a shield of safety over our heads, but a sword of subjugation at our hears; and that the only alternative now left to us is either base submission or revolutionary resistance.

I therefore recognize no other rallying point for my patriotism than the unfurled flag of our good old Commonwealth, and no true Virginian will hesitate to follow its fortunes, or to fight beneath its folds.

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