Rhetorical Analysis Of Patrick Henry's Speech To The Virginia Convention

In the “Speech to the Virginia Convention” (1775), Patrick Henry convinced the colonist to fight against Britain using several different rhetorical devices; the four main ones were rhetorical questions, parallelism, diction, and allusion. These devices helped give him the power to be able to connect to the audience and show them what he see’s through examples of common stories that the audience already knew about. The use of rhetorical questions, the first rhetorical device, allows the audience to think and reflect/react about the situation they are in right now. “And what have we to oppose to them? Shall we try argument?”(Henry p.264). He tells the audience that arguing with Britain, once more, will be ineffective such that they have to do more than just argue with the crown. “Is it that insidious smile with which our petition has been lately received?”(Henry p.264). Henry here demonstrates how Britain reacts to the petitions that the Americans sent. However, Britain does not care at all, but themselves, hence the insidious smile. Parallelism, the second rhetorical device, helps Henry to further emphasize the importance of going off to war
Without those four main rhetorical devices, the speech would have been hesitant and powerless, however the speech was dominant, convincing, and influential to the audience's perspective of whether or not they should go to war with Britain. Henry did not only use these four rhetorical devices, he used several other different ones that had the exact same supreme, but there was still something about these four that just overruled the rest. If Patrick Henry did not inspire the colonist to fight against their ruler, Britain, who knows if we, to this day, would still be under the Great Britain rule or would someone else had filled in the