Rhetorical Analysis Of Speech By Fredrick Douglass

Fredrick Douglass started off his speech as a humble individual. He let the audience know he was nervous and didn’t prepare a punctual speech to present, he was going with the flow. Although Fredrick wasn’t a slave anymore he still expressed the great distance between that plantation and the hall in which he was being granted the honor to speak. He made his audience aware by noting that the United States at seventy-six years of age. Telling his audience that the U.S is still a young nation in the “impressible” stage of its existence, and suggests a hope that this means it’s can still be changed. He describes how your fathers went so far in their excitement as to pronounce the measure of government unjust, unreasonable, and oppressive, and altogether

Those who opposed the revolution, he says, are the same people who have always existed and who hate all kinds of change except silver gold and copper change. Today, their opposition is seen as unpatriotic. Douglass expresses his personal respect for the signers of the Declaration of Independence, describing them as “brave men” and stating that it is natural for you the audience, to want to celebrate the rewards now being reaped because of the signers’ actions. For a time, he elaborates upon the bravery of those who were driven to revolution and his own admiration of, and understanding of, their reasons. He then states, “we have to do with the past only as we can make it useful to the present and to the future.” He makes explicit what has been implied in the speech to this point: the fact that the same oppression against which the early Americans fought is still being visited upon blacks in America. He notes,”Sydney Smith tells us that men seldom eulogize the wisdom and virtues of their fathers,but to excuse some folly or wickedness of their own.” Douglass reminds his audience of the disparity between

To illustrate thi point, he offered the following rhetirocal question, “Fellow- citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here to-day? What have I, or those i represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declration of Independence, extended to us? And am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the national alter, and to confess the benefits and express devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your independence to us?” In the last statement, these is a tone of both absurdity and irony. In historical context, it was not unusual for white slave owners to believe that slaves should have been grateful to their masters for slothing them, feeding them, and delivering them from a dark, heathehen land. Douglass likely may have been alluding to that particular attitude. The tone of speech becomes more indignant. He claims that no nation on earth is guilty of crimes “more shocking and bloody” than the United states. He says its “celebration is a sham” and its “shouts of liberty and equality” are “hollow mockery.” Thus in the speech, he not only ridicules the idea that plackpeople should take