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Rhetorical Strategies In John Downe's Letter

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In the 1830s, John Downe wrote a letter to his wife in hopes of convincing her to join him in the United States. In the letter he uses rhetorical strategies such as tone, diction and pathos to convey the greatness that was the United States.
Downe immediately uses diction in the semantic field of pleasantry to describe his current living situation. He explains how he was instantly "welcome[d]" by his master. Downe also uses a combination of gustatory and visual imagery when writing about the abundance of food the United States had to offer. He then writes of all "the fruit you can gather on the side of the road" to further explain this abundance. This imagery was used to activate the reader's (his wife's) mental eye and evoke their sensory
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