American Ethos Pathos Logos

“What to the slave is the Fourth of July”? “Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural injustice, embodied in the Declaration of Independence, extended to us”? Although Douglass delivered his speech to a mostly sympathetic audience, he achieved a proper condemnation of America through the strategies of Pathos and parallelism.

Douglass portrays the life an American slave through the imagery he uses to reach Pathos. He uses many words that can make the audience feel different ways about their view on slavery. This is revealed when he explains what really happened to slaves and why they are not working for a wage or why they are not given their liberty. To explain further, Douglass is aiming at the heart of the people in the
audience so that they will change their view on slavery and it will be end sometime. In addition Douglass achieves this when he makes good appeals to the people. This is revealed when he refers to the founding fathers as if they did not want slavery begin. To explain further he said that the “Founding Fathers were peaceful men; but they prefered revolution to peaceful submission to bondage”. Douglass made his appeals to Pathos clear to the audience and hopes it can make a change by using other strategies to.

Throughout the speech there were some parallelism, which made things easier and more clear to understand.
This is when we was talking about the rights and how the slaves were beaten, it has all similar ideas all with a similar structure to it. In paragraph 39 Douglass uses parallelism to show us what was going on at that time. This is also when Douglass refers that America is still young, and that it is still learning what is bad and what is good; it shows parallelism in the paragraph because it shows why the nation is young. He used a lot of parallel structure in the first paragraph. This is showed when he starts off with “quailing sensation” and has a similar structure when it gets to another point talking about feelings. Also in paragraph 3 he uses distance then difficulties later. Even though this speech didn’t change anyone's mind that slavery is bad and that it should be stopped, but others changed their minds that everyone should think about this a little bit more.

In this speech Douglass used the strategies of parallelism and pathos to change people's mind on slavery. That didn’t work but it did spark the fight to end slavery for good. Thirteen years after this speech was given slavery was formally ended. This is a good speech given by Douglass to hopefully put an end to
slavery.