Henry David Thoreau won his audience over in the appeal to pathos, when describing his time in prison, for not paying polltax. But his strongest appeal is the appeal to ethos. Thoreau is not only a philosopher, poet, essayist and naturalist, but also has experience first hand in jail. Readers usually take to a strong sense of credibility to first hand experiences, such as his. Logos appears rarely, once when he made a connection the the,then current, Mexican war. He claims this time was when the government was very unstable. He also bring the revolution of ‘75, when the government was taxing certain foreign commodities (9). His popular use of rhetorical strategy in this essay is the metaphor “it is sort of a wooden gun to the people themselves”(2),
