Rhetorical Analysis - Essay Example

Whereas Douglass addresses the mass audience, comprising people from all walks of life, on the US Independence ceremony, Langston’s audience comprises of people who were mentally prepare to judge Langston’s words from a legal as well as a humanitarian vantage point. Indeed Douglass’s audiences were less prone to embrace legal argument than Langston’s audiences are. Therefore these two men’s rhetoric strategies are also different from each other. Necessarily Douglass has to make his speech comprehensible by making it elaborative and embellishing it with emotional tropes, whereas Langston’s speech appears to be substantive and fraught with poetic imageries, rhetoric devices, especially prepared for an audience of reasoning intellect.

Before an audience which largely comprises white people, both Langston and Douglass have to associate the African American with religious, more specifically with Christian, sentiment in order to draw their sympathy. Both of these two speakers have done so by using the rhetoric device of metonymy. While Douglass addresses his people as the “emancipated people of God” (321), Langston describes the ability of the emancipated slaves to escape as something “God-given powers” (Langston, 1859, p 233). . Another two mentionable metonymies used by Langston and Douglass are respectively “colored people” and “colored brethren”.

Out of a number of parallelisms used in Douglass’s speech a remarkable one is: “It [Independence Day] carries your minds back to the day, and to the act of your great deliverance; and to the signs, and to the wonders, associated with that act, and that day” (Douglass, 1852, p 321). In this sentence, Douglass describes the recalling functions of the Independence Days in a series of related infinitive phrases. But a more striking parallelism occurs in the preceding sentence: “[Independence], to you, is what the Passover was to the emancipated people of God.

” (Douglass, 1852, p 321) In this line, he draws a parallel between “the 4th July” and the “Passover”. Similarly “In Address to the Court” Langston uses another parallelism to expose the invalidity of the “Fugitive of Slave Law”. He says, “The [Fugitive Slave Law] under which I am arraigned is an unjust one, one made to crush the colored man, and one that outrages every feeling of Humanity, as well as every rule of Right.” (Langston, 1859, p 234) In opposition to the ‘Fugitive Slave Law’, Langston is quite successful to depict the African American, as a people struggling for their liberty, through the use of another parallelism: “And there were others who had become free…‘by escaping…eluding the blood-thirsty patrols…outrunning bloodhounds and horses, swimming rivers and fording swamps, and reaching at last…” (Langston, 1859, p 233) Meanwhile in the same sentence, he refers to the self-contradiction of the freedom of the slave, enacted by the 13th Amendment, through the use of irony.

Indeed the Fugitive Slave Law was