Rhetorical Devices In Patrick Henry's Speech

In the speech of Patrick Henry, in the Virginia Convention, he tries to persuade his fellow peers to think like him. Henry wants them to agree with his idea that war was the only option. Throughout his speech, he structures it to be very convincing, and well written. He plans out the way he presents this speech for this conference to make it compatible to the audience he is speaking to. Henry employs rhetorical devices to get his point across to these people. The devices he embodies within his speech are logos, allusion, repetition, and rhetorical questions.
As Henry goes more and more into the speech it becomes clear that he is obviously trying to convince the audience of something. The way he convinces his audience is by appealing to their logic, which is a rhetorical device known as logos. The way that Henry utilizes logos in his speech is by asking the audience rhetorical questions. One example of Henry’s rhetorical questions is, “How do we know England will act any different?”, this makes the people wonder, and come to the same conclusion as Henry; the conclusion that if they trust England, again, then the same things will happen. He carefully places each question to have a strong impact on the audience, therefore making the speech more persuasive.
Henry’s speech doesn’t only contain logos,
He used these rhetorical devices to persuade these people, by, basically, outsmarting them. Henry single handedly put this speech together to bottle the minds of everyone listening, and gave them a brand new idea. He didn’t have to do anything outrageous to get the idea across, the devices of this speech made an appeal to all of these people, and also made them questions themselves. But, the overall impact on the audience was making them come to the conclusion that they have to go to war. Henry may not have been the smartest person in there,but he certainly outsmarted them in his