Patrick Henry Rhetorical Analysis Essay

After the first shots were fired at Lexington and Concord, many people were indecisive about which side to support in the Revolutionary war. Delegates from the colonies came together to decide whether to break away from Great Britain or reconcile with them. The thirteen colonies were split into three groups, patriots, who supported breaking away from the English crown, loyalists, who supported the king, and undecided people. At the delegation people would give speeches advocating for both sides of the conflict, one of these people was Patrick Henry. Patrick Henry uses pathos, his audience's sense of patriotism, and ethos, calling Britain and its king a tyrant, in his speech to arouse support for the efforts of the patriots in breaking away from Great Britain. In Patrick Henry’s speech in the Virginia Convention, he uses a multitude of examples of using his fellow delegates sense of pride and patriotism, pathos, to create support for the patriot cause. He starts off by saying “ no man thinks more highly than i do of the patriotism,...”( Henry 1). The purpose of commencing his speech with that line is to invoke the patriotic feelings in the rest of the delegates. At the end of the

He starts off by saying that the presence of the british military and navy was there to “bind and rivet upon us the chains which the British ministry have been so long forging” (4). Henry oritates this in his speech because he is trying to call the attention the increasing presence of the british military for no good reason. Another piece of evidence is when he calls the laws from England as “tyrannical hands of the ministry and parliament” (5). Henry’s point of view was from a member of the house of delegates who saw the policies of the British as unreasonable and nonapplicable because he felt only the colonies could tax