Benjamin Baker's Letter To The Mode Of Persuasion

In the 1700s, slavery was still very much present in the United States. Not far from its recent birth as a country, Benjamin Baker, a well-rounded man, wrote a letter to Thomas Jefferson, who at the time was the secretary of state, addressing the current state of slavery and his plea against it. The mode of persuasion he used in his argument was the use of guilting Thomas Jefferson by smoothly using several rhetorical strategies.
To begin with, the main weapon he used to make his case was using several allusions to guilt Thomas Jefferson. He started by instructing Jefferson to think back when the United States was oppressed by Great Britain and how horrible conditions and justices were. The constant state of hopelessness. ←- include that in previous sentence) He wanted Jefferson to formulate an image he onced himself …show more content…
The excerpt of the letter was mostly composed of lengthy sentences which were paused by several commas. The commas enabled him to put correlated ideas that supported his main point in the sentence. It also allowed Jefferson to pause and think of his small statements.. The length of the sentences also exhibited the amount of thoughtfulness he put into his letter. This characteristic further shows that his argument against slavery is one he is not taking lightly and that he expects some sort of outcome.
Along with that, the tone that was carried through his letter was that of a resolved attitude for an appeal to be made. If it were a lighthearted tone his argument would of been feeble. He was quite respectable but still displayed an air that was a bit authoritative. This sort of tone is understandable because of the seriousness of the matter. Baker made sure he wanted to be taken seriously and for that he didn’t want to seem spineless. There was mostly an emotional plea that echoed throughout this excerpt of the letter. It’s pretty evident since he used guilt as his main persuasion