Frederick Douglass Speech Rhetorical Analysis

Frederick Douglass and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were both very active abolitionists. These two wrote very good, informative speeches that are important in history. Douglass spoke about his experiences, and his thoughts and beliefs on slavery in his speech, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” In a speech titled, “Declaration of Sentiments” Stanton wrote about how wrong society was on the topic of women’s rights in a very enticing manner, using the Declaration of Independence as a way of making her speech more credible. Frederick Douglass and Elizabeth Cady Stanton had the same basic purpose for giving their respective speeches, and they accomplished their end goal in very similar ways, including giving allusions to the Bible as well as the Declaration of Independence, using many forms of ethos, pathos, and logos, as well as using a serious tone. Frederick Douglass made many allusions to the Bible in his speech about slavery. One example …show more content…
In one whole paragraph he made an allusion to the Bible yet again, which used a form of pathos. He said, “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down. Yea! we wept when we remembered Zion...” (Douglass 286). This gave an emotional appeal to the listener because it captured a familiar story from the Bible that would catch the listener's emotions. An example of a time when he used ethos was when he captured the audience by exclaiming, “To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass-fronted...:” (289). By venting this, he is saying that the white people have different definitions of Independence than those of his own race. This is an example of ethos because it lets the audience know that treating slaves badly is