Son of a former slave, farmer, astronomer, mathematician, surveyor, and author Benjamin Banneker in his letter to Thomas Jefferson, a mournful way to declare his knowledge towards the slaves in the United States. Banneker’s purpose is to justify the ways of living of the slaves. He adopts an aggravated tone in order to forebode in his letter. Banneker achieves his tone through the use of selection of details and syntax.…
In a letter to Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Banneker uses a succession of rhetorical strategies to isolate the injustices of black oppression and embolden the abolition of slavery. Banneker uses advanced diction to confirm his cogency and blatantly uses logic to support his cause. He meritoriously manipulates quotes from the Bible and the Declaration of Independence to point out the hypocrisy at hand. Banneker identifies the unjust actions of Jefferson and indicates the contrast in which blacks and whites receive different civil liberties and constitutional…
Slavery is infamously known in American history as “America’s greatest shame”. Accompanied by the concept of slavery was vast opposition due to it being unconstitutional and contradicting the basis of American government. Benjamin Banneker writes a simple letter to Thomas Jefferson that effectively argues against the institution of slavery utilizing political appeals, irony, repetition, and a snarky tone.…
Benjamin Banneker is a very passionate man when it comes to racial issues. In fact, he, himself was the son of a slave, which would indicate that he was a man who has experienced racial complications. Banneker (once educated), decided to become an advocate for racial freedom and equality. Mr. Banneker wrote a letter to Thomas Jefferson in hopes of persuading him to rethink the government’s position on slavery. In the letter Banneker uses allusions, repetition, religious diction, and pathos in his writing in hopes to evoke a change in the hypocrisy the colonists’ government has proven to be.…
In 1791, astronomer, mathematician, and author, Benjamin Banneker, in his letter addressed to Thomas Jefferson argues about slavery. Banneker’s purpose was to persuade Jefferson of the injustice of slavery and alter his view on it. Banneker adopts a formal yet condemning tone in order to appeal to Jefferson’s sense of moral character. He also uses several rhetorical techniques such as tone, diction, ethos, and pathos to make his position of the given subject clear.…
In my rhetorical analysis I analyzed Banneker’s comparison of pre-revolutionary war to slavery, religious references, and tone. I selected Banneker’s descriptive use of imagery to compare the pre-revolution to slavery, because this comparison struck me as a crucial aspect to his argument. Banneker needed Jefferson, a privileged man who never experienced the life of a slave, to feel a personal connection to the situation. By creating a comparison to something that Jefferson had a crucial role in, Banneker attempts to do just that. I fould this comparison an especially powerful way to start of a letter, because it almost forced Jefferson to continue reading, as it brought his life into the equation. Next, I choose to analyse Banneker’s use of religious references because I felt that these references strengthened Jefferson’s connection with his argument against slavery. I especially focused on the quote from Job because I think it made Banneker’s argument more clear and comparable. Jefferson could read Job’s quote and make a connection the the situation of slavery, and thus understand slavery better. Finally, I choose to analyze Banneker’s tone because his tone…
Franklin Benjamin Sanborn was two years old when he was struck by a bolt of lightning at his family’s old farmhouse in Hampton Fall, New Hampshire. He tries to make something stir in the world. Sanborn talents were making a stir by “unfailing genius when it came to provoking others” (Fuller pg. 43). Even though, he caused trouble a writer named Ralph W. Emerson moved Sanborn with his book of essays. The essays “suggest the world’s possibilities, assuring him that reliance upon one’s inner principles” (Fuller pg. 44) to make a mark in history.…
Slavery, the dark beast that consumes, devours, and pillages the souls of those who are forced to within its bounds and those who think they are the powerful controllers of this filth they call business. This act is the pinnacle of human ignorance, they use it as the building blocks for their “trade,” and treat these people no more than replaceable property that can be bought, sold, and beaten on a whim. The narrative of Frederick Douglass is a tale about a boy who is coming of age in a world that does not accept him for who he is and it is also told as a horror that depicts what we can only imagine as the tragedies placed on these people in these institutions of slavery. It is understood as a chronicle of his life telling us his story from childhood to manhood and all that is in between, whilst all this is going on he vividly mixes pathological appeals to make us feel for him and all his brethren that share his burden. His narrative is a map from slavery to freedom where he, in the beginning, was a slave of both body and mind. But as the story progresses we see his transformation to becoming a free man both of the law and of the mind. He focuses on emotion and the building up of his character to show us what he over time has become. This primarily serves to make the reader want to follow his cause all the more because of his elegant and intelligent style of mixing appeals. Through his effective use of anecdotes and vivid imagery he shows us his different epiphanies over time, and creates appeals to his character by showing us how he as a person has matured, and his reader’s emotion giving us the ability to feel for his situation in a more real sense. This helps argue that the institution of slavery is a parasitic bug that infects the slave holder with a false sense of power and weakens the slave in both body and spirit.…
“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.…
He points out that Franklin dedicated his personal effects to aid in his fight against slavery. This is shown where he uses his own printing press to publish anti-slavery pamphlets. He mentions in his letters having published information on importing of slaves from Africa. The information was aimed at providing awareness and educating the Africans on their rights. The question however arises as to whether this information really helped in educating the Africans.…
The beauty of humor is its ability to rely a message of importance in manner that is not reprimanding thus most audiences are more reciprocal to what is being said. In Franklin’s time slavery was in full swing even though society was slowly realizing it was wrong. Franklin instead of forming a protest and speaking out against anyone who owns slaves, Franklin wrote “The Pennsylvania Abolition Society to the United States Congress” and the piece “Benjamin Franklin to the Federal Gazette” to highlight the unjustness of slavery in both a forward way of all are equal and satirical way. When reading such writing both give the reader a gentle push to consider whether they are in the wrong without reprimanding anyone. His technique helps him to argue for what is right without being seeming…
A metaphor is the use of something familiar to understand something less familiar. For instance, if a news report says "unemployment went down this month," the familiar feeling of "going down" helps everyone to understand that the number of people looking for work has reduced.…
Freedom is a very loose term which is interpreted differently by people of diverse heritage and culture. In the 1800's and earlier it was believed by some that it was their "freedom" to be able to buy and sell fellow mankind on an open market, to be used as property for the betterment of the slaveholder's own fortune. In this essay I will look at a letter from Frederick Douglass, an ex-slave, to Thomas Auld, his former master. The correspondence was in the form of an open public letter to Auld on the tenth anniversary of Douglass' abolition. The letter could be considered an "autoethnographic text" which Mary Louise Pratt defines in her essay, Arts of the Contact Zone, "a text in which people undertake to describe themselves in ways that engage with representations others have made of them" (519). I will analyze the different points that make this unique piece of literature an art of the contact zone.…
The book begins by the author asking his readers to overcome the common image of Franklin huddled around a candle writing his endless amount of words he composed in his lifetime. The author suggests that we envision a man who enjoys the open air, walking, women, telling jokes, and having a drink with his friends.1 Morgan immediately achieves separating the common known characteristics of Franklin to the Franklin that he has come to know from his research of the letters of correspondence.…
Well, it is the use of metaphor to create a layer/layers of meaning that’s beyond the literal level of interpretation. One of the ways Hawthorne’s story demonstrates this tool is through the multifaceted representation of faith. These manifestations are the wife of the protagonist , the Puritan beliefs that he and his community supposedly believe in, and Goodman’s hope in the world as a whole.…