What Are The Literary Devices Used In Letter To Benjamin Banneker

When a man with as many diverse qualifications and backgrounds as Benjamin Banneker wrote a letter arguing against slavery targeted towards someone like Thomas Jefferson, the product was a masterfully persuasive document with the ability to convince anyone of the time period to adopt his position. To convince someone who was at least as skillful at writing as himself, Banneker used a wide variety of literary devices that added to the overall effectiveness of his paper. His most common devices include many appeals to various human emotions and allusions to situations used as parallels to his position. Banneker used two main types of appeals: an appeal to ethics and an appeal to fear. In his letter these devices are intertwined to persuade his target audience to take his side. His paper is full of these and other appeals designed to manipulate one’s emotions and change their viewpoint. One example of this is after he talks of the injustice of

After referring to these situations in his letter, Banneker then compared each condition with the case of the time. The American Revolution was used to parallel between slavery of those enslaved at the time and the dominion exercised over the colonies during the time period Thomas Jefferson was so crucial in ending. Banneker used Job to direct Jefferson saying, “as Job proposed to his friends, ‘put your souls in their soul's stead,’ thus shall your hearts be enlarged with kindness and benevolence towards them, and thus shall you need neither the direction of myself or others, in what manner to proceed herein” (Banneker 48-53). Banneker’s intent is to establish, using a trusted source, that the issue of slavery must be further investigated and questioned to follow the time honored book that most people of the time built their lives