Rhetorical Analysis Of Frederick Douglass's Speech

Frederick Douglas inspired the nation through his impactful speeches against the discrimination and injustice centered around slavery and free blacks alike. Throughout his speeches, his utilized the rhetorical strategy of persistent question asking along with strategic organization to grab the audience’s attention and make his speech even more impactful. His utilization of persistent question asking is a strategic plan to draw the reader into his speech. Throughout his speeches, Frederick Douglas asks the audience rhetorical questions to get them to ponder onto their own personal opinion on the matter. To make a larger impact he backs up his questions by answering a few of them so the listener has a better chance of agreeing with his point

Douglas utilizes this question to state his positions on the horrors of slavery, in a way that would leave the greatest impact on the listener's mind. Through the act of simply stating the horrors of a slave’s everyday life, he would have still captured a percentage of the audience's attention. However, by stating the horrors in a question format, he appeals to the listener's ethos by asking if these tasks are such a bad thing in a sense of mockery towards the opposing side, and this helps him gain more support. He implements the use of rhetorical questions as a way to address the main argument of the speech as well. The point of Frederick Douglass Speech, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July”, is to make the public realize that even though the United States is free from Britain's rule, slaves will not enjoy this same sense of freedom until are set free. He draws people into his speech by asking the question “what to the American

In his speech “The Church and Prejudice”, he starts out with detailed accounts of prejudice that blacks have experienced in the house of God and even the prejudice he has experienced himself when he just wanted to practice his religion. He includes a true story about a black girl who passed along a cup filled with the representation of Jesus’s blood to a young lady “who had been converted at the same time, baptized in the same water, and put her trusted in the same blessed Saviour… when the cup containing the precious blood which has been shed for all, came to her, she rose up in disdain and walked out of the church” (Prejudice 1). This account displays the prejudice blacks experienced at the time as they struggled to practice their beloved religion. By starting off his speech with this emotional story, Douglas appeals to the listener's ethos and makes his message of freedom for all, more personal. The speech transitions into his personal opinion of the matter to home in on the fact that the American people need to halt the prejudice acts occurring in houses of worship throughout the United States. He stresses his point of the inequality experienced within America as he proclaims that whites do “not allow that [blacks] have a head to think, and a heart to feel, and a soul to aspire. They treat [them] not as men, but as dogs.. [they] shut [their] mouths, and then ask