The structure balances ideas through antithesis, a rhetorical device that poses contrary qualities against each other: They were peace men, but they preferred revolution ….

How does the structure of those sentences reinforce the main idea of the paragraph? The carefully balanced structure reinforces the idea that the founders were themselves balanced, reasonable men. What inference does Douglass want his audience to draw from his portrayal of the founders? Since he established an identification between the founders and the abolitionists in paragraphs 4 and 6, the temperate qualities he ascribes here to the former apply to the latter as well, and this ascription is important because it addresses the charge that abolitionists were fanatics and monomaniacs.

Often speakers and writers make their points as much by leaving things out as by putting things in. This strategy is known as the strategic silence. What has Douglass omitted in his portrayal of the fathers? Why would he choose to do so? Douglass never mentions the fact that many of the fathers were slave owners. This silence allows Douglass to create his own version of the fathers, untainted by facts that would challenge his portrayal.

Similarly, they deflect the minds of his listeners from points that might lead them to resist his argument. Here you might encourage a debate among your students. Other students may argue that this omission does not weaken his case. Despite being slaveholders, men like Washington and Jefferson did, in fact, establish a nation built on the ideals of justice and freedom.

That many of the founders did not live up to those ideals does not make them any less compelling. They were peace men; but they preferred revolution to peaceful submission to bondage. They were quiet men; but they did not shrink from agitating against oppression. They showed forbearance ; but they knew its limits. They believed in order; but not in the order of tyranny [government rule of absolute power].

You may well cherish the memory of such men. They were great in their day and generation. Their solid manhood stands out the more as we contrast it with these degenerate times. Note: Arguments and counter-arguments lie at the heart of persuasive discourse. Review with your students what speakers and writers try to do when making a case. They put forth their arguments and refute those of their opponents. We offer passages that illustrate all of these strategies. What point of view does Douglass announce in this paragraph?

In paragraph 3 Douglass alluded to the fact that he had been a slave. In this paragraph his listeners discover the full import of the fact for his speech. Identifying himself with the enslaved, he announces that he will consider the Fourth of July from their perspective. How does paragraph 37 relate to paragraph 36? Douglass continues to argue that slaves are men.

How does Douglass develop this paragraph? He does so by listing examples of some of things slaves do that are done by others also: ploughing, planting, building, writing, raising children, etc. For the present, it is enough to affirm the equal manhood of the Negro race. How does Douglass maintain the order and coherence of the first sentence of this paragraph? He employs parallelism, a type of organization in which a writer places similar ideas in a similar structure.

They establish a rhythm that emphasizes each indignity and heighten the emotional impact of the argument. What, am I to argue that it is wrong to make men brutes, to rob them of their liberty, to work them without wages, to keep them ignorant of their relations to their fellow men, to beat them with sticks, to flay their flesh with the lash, to load their limbs with irons, to hunt them with dogs, to sell them at auction, to sunder their families, to knock out their teeth, to burn their flesh, to starve them into obedience and submission to their masters?

Must I argue that a system thus marked with blood, and stained with pollution, is wrong? I will not. I have better employments for my time and strength than such arguments would imply. What, then, remains to be argued? Is it that slavery is not divine; that God did not establish it; that our doctors of divinity [preachers, ministers] are mistaken? There is blasphemy in the thought.

That which is inhuman, cannot be divine! Who can reason on such a proposition? They that can, may; I cannot. The time for such argument is past. What strategy of argument does Douglass employ in this section of his speech? Here Douglass established his own moral authority to speak on the issue of slavery by citing his own experience, by establishing himself as reliable witness with first-hand information. I was born amid such sights and scenes.

To me the American slave-trade is a terrible reality. When a child, my soul was often pierced with a sense of its horrors. There was, at that time, a grand slave mart kept at the head of Pratt Street, by Austin Woldfolk. These men were generally well dressed men, and very captivating in their manners.

Ever ready to drink, to treat, and to gamble. The fate of many a slave has depended upon the turn of a single card; and many a child has been snatched from the arms of its mother by bargains arranged in a state of brutal drunkenness. The flesh-mongers gather up their victims by dozens, and drive them, chained, to the general depot at Baltimore. When a sufficient number have been collected here, a ship is chartered, for the purpose of conveying the forlorn crew to Mobile, or to New Orleans.

From the slave prison to the ship, they are usually driven in the darkness of night; for since the antislavery agitation, a certain caution is observed. In the deep still darkness of midnight, I have been often aroused by the dead heavy footsteps, and the piteous cries of the chained gangs that passed our door.

The anguish of my boyish heart was intense; and I was often consoled, when speaking to my mistress in the morning, to hear her say that the custom was very wicked; that she hated to hear the rattle of the chains, and the heart-rending cries. I was glad to find one who sympathized with me in my horror. How does this paragraph relate to the overall thesis of the speech? Here Douglass offers the strongest illustration of the ways in which America is false to the ideals it has set for itself.

What is the thesis of this paragraph? The ways in which Americans practice their politics and religion are inconsistent with the values and ideals they claim to be following. You boast of your love of liberty, your superior civilization, and your pure Christianity, while the whole political power of the nation as embodied in the two great political parties , is solemnly pledged to support and perpetuate the enslavement of three millions of your countrymen.

You hurl your anathemas at the crowned headed tyrants of Russia and Austria, and pride yourselves on your Democratic institutions, while you yourselves consent to be the mere tools and bodyguards of the tyrants of Virginia and Carolina. You invite to your shores fugitives of oppression from abroad, honor them with banquets, greet them with ovations, cheer them, toast them, salute them, protect them, and pour out your money to them like water; but the fugitives from your own land you advertise, hunt, arrest, shoot and kill.

You glory in your refinement and your universal education yet you maintain a system as barbarous and dreadful as ever stained the character of a nation — a system begun in avarice , supported in pride, and perpetuated in cruelty. You are all on fire at the mention of liberty for France or for Ireland; but are as cold as an iceberg at the thought of liberty for the enslaved of America.

You discourse eloquently on the dignity of labor; yet, you sustain a system which, in its very essence, casts a stigma upon labor. You can bare your bosom to the storm of British artillery to throw off a threepenny tax on tea; and yet wring the last hard-earned farthing [a coin formerly used in Great Britain] from the grasp of the black laborers of your country. Not only does he address a powerful justification for the continuation of slavery — the belief that it is protected by the Constitution — but he also asserts a controversial theory about Constitutional interpretation.

Read its preamble, consider its purposes. Is slavery among them? Is it at the gateway [the preamble]?

It is neither. While I do not intend to argue this question on the present occasion, let me ask, if it be not somewhat singular that, if the Constitution were intended to be, by its framers and adopters, a slave-holding instrument, why neither slavery, slaveholding, nor slave can anywhere be found in it. What would be thought of an instrument [legal agreement, in this case a deed] , drawn up, legally drawn up, for the purpose of entitling [giving ownership to] the city of Rochester to a tract [piece] of land, in which no mention of land was made?

Now, there are certain rules of interpretation, for the proper understanding of all legal instruments. These rules are well established. They are plain, common-sense rules, such as you and I, and all of us, can understand and apply, without having passed years in the study of law. I scout the idea that the question of the constitutionality or unconstitutionality of slavery is not a question for the people.

I hold that every American citizen has a right to form an opinion of the Constitution, and to propagate that opinion, and to use all honorable means to make his opinion the prevailing one.

Without this right, the liberty of an American citizen would be as insecure as that of a Frenchman. Ex-Vice-President Dallas tells us that the Constitution is an object to which no American mind can be too attentive, and no American heart too devoted.

He further says, the Constitution, in its words, is plain and intelligible, and is meant for the home-bred, unsophisticated understandings of our fellow-citizens. Senator Berrien tells us that the Constitution is the fundamental law, that which controls all others.

The charter of our liberties, which every citizen has a personal interest in understanding thoroughly. The testimony of Senator Breese, Lewis Cass, and many others that might be named, who are everywhere esteemed as sound lawyers, so regard the Constitution. I take it, therefore, that it is not presumption in a private citizen to form an opinion of that instrument. Note: Conclusions are important. Ask your students how they function and what they should do.

The final words an audience hears, they often linger and shape the impression of an entire speech. Traditionally, speakers use them to do four things: leave the audience with a favorable opinion, emphasize key points, stimulate an appropriate emotional response, or summarize the argument.

Douglass does not emphasize key points or restate his arguments. Rather, he seeks to cast his case for abolition in a favorable light and instill hope in his listeners. What are conclusions supposed to do? Traditionally, four things: leave the audience with a favorable opinion, emphasize key points, stimulate an appropriate emotional response, or summarize the argument. Even though he has just delivered a dark and stinging denunciation of the country, he does not want his listeners to leave the hall feeling depressed and hopeless.

On what does Douglass base the hope he expresses in this paragraph? He looks to the past and the ideals expressed in the Declaration of Independence. JOHN A. At first, he could give no encouragement; with unfeigned diffidence, he expressed his conviction that he was not adequate to the performance of so great a task; the path marked out was wholly an untrodden one; he was sincerely apprehensive that he should do more harm than good.

After much deliberation, however, he consented to make a trial; and ever since that period, he has acted as a lecturing agent, under the auspices either of the American or the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. In labors he has been most abundant; and his success in combating prejudice, in gaining proselytes, in agitating the public mind, has far surpassed the most sanguine expectations that were raised at the commencement of his brilliant career.

He has borne himself with gentleness and meekness, yet with true manliness of character. As a public speaker, he excels in pathos, wit, comparison, imitation, strength of reasoning, and fluency of language.

There is in him that union of head and heart, which is indispensable to an enlightenment of the heads and a winning of the hearts of others. May his strength continue to be equal to his day! May he continue to "grow in grace, and in the knowledge of God," that he may be increasingly serviceable in the cause of bleeding humanity, whether at home or abroad! Let the calumniators of the colored Page vii race despise themselves for their baseness and illiberality of spirit, and henceforth cease to talk of the natural inferiority of those who require nothing but time and opportunity to attain to the highest point of human excellence.

It may, perhaps, be fairly questioned, whether any other portion of the population of the earth could have endured the privations, sufferings and horrors of slavery, without having become more degraded in the scale of humanity than the slaves of African descent.

Nothing has been left undone to cripple their intellects, darken their minds, debase their moral nature, obliterate all traces of their relationship to mankind; and yet how wonderfully they have sustained the mighty load of a most frightful bondage, under which they have been groaning for centuries!

To illustrate the effect of slavery on the white man,--to show that he has no powers of endurance, in such a condition, superior to those of his black brother, -- DANIEL O'CONNELL, the distinguished advocate of universal emancipation, and the mightiest champion of prostrate but not conquered Ireland, relates the following anecdote in a speech delivered by him in the Conciliation Hall, Dublin, before the Loyal National Repeal Association, March 31, It has a natural, an inevitable tendency to brutalize every noble faculty of man.

An American sailor, who was cast away on the shore of Africa, where he was kept in slavery for three years, was, at the expiration of that period, found to be imbruted and stultified--he had lost all reasoning power; and having forgotten his native language, could only utter some savage gibberish between Arabic and English, which nobody could understand, and which even he himself found difficulty in pronouncing. DOUGLASS has very properly chosen to write his own Narrative, in his own style, and according to the best of his ability, rather than to employ some one else.

It is, therefore, entirely his own production; and, considering how long and dark was the career he had to run as a slave,--how few have been his opportunities to improve his mind since he broke his iron fetters--it is, in my judgment, highly creditable to his head and heart.

He who can peruse it without a tearful eye, a heaving breast, an afflicted spirit,--without being filled with an unutterable abhorrence of slavery and all its abettors, and animated with a determination to seek the immediate overthrow of that execrable system,--without trembling for the fate of this country in the hands of a righteous God, who is ever on the side of the oppressed, and whose arm is not shortened that it cannot save,--must have a flinty heart, and be qualified to act the part of a trafficker "in slaves and the souls of men.

Many have suffered incomparably more, while very few on the plantations have suffered less, than himself. Yet how deplorable was his situation! This Narrative contains many affecting incidents, many passages of great eloquence and power; but I think the most thrilling one of them all is the description DOUGLASS gives of his feelings, as he stood soliloquizing respecting his fate, and the chances of his one day being a freeman, on the banks of the Chesapeake Bay--viewing the receding vessels as they flew with their white wings before the breeze, and apostrophizing them as animated by the living spirit of freedom.

Who can read that passage, and be insensible to its pathos and sublimity? Compressed into it is a whole Alexandrian library of thought, feeling, and sentiment--all that can, all that need be urged, in the form of expostulation, entreaty, rebuke, against that crime of crimes,--making man the property of his fellow-man!

O, how accursed is that system, which entombs the godlike mind of man, defaces the divine image, reduces those who by creation were crowned Page x with glory and honor to a level with four-footed beasts, and exalts the dealer in human flesh above all that is called God!

Why should its existence be prolonged one hour? Is it not evil, only evil, and that continually? What does its presence imply but the absence of all fear of God, all regard for man, on the part of the people of the United States?

Heaven speed its eternal overthrow! So profoundly ignorant of the nature of slavery are many persons, that they are stubbornly incredulous whenever they read or listen to any recital of the cruelties which are daily inflicted on its victims. They do not deny that the slaves are held as property; but that terrible fact seems to convey to their minds no idea of injustice, exposure to outrage, or savage barbarity.

Tell them of cruel scourgings, of mutilations and brandings, of scenes of pollution and blood, of the banishment of all light and knowledge, and they affect to be greatly indignant at such enormous exaggerations, such wholesale misstatements, such abominable libels on the character of the southern planters! As if all these direful outrages were not the natural results of slavery!

As if it were less cruel to reduce a human being to the condition of a thing, than to give him a severe flagellation, or to deprive him of necessary food and clothing!

As if whips, chains, thumb-screws, paddles, bloodhounds, overseers, drivers, patrols, were not all indispensable to keep the slaves down, and to give protection to their ruthless oppressors!

As if, when the marriage institution is abolished, concubinage, adultery, and incest, must not necessarily abound; when all the rights of humanity are annihilated, any barrier remains to protect the victim from the fury of the spoiler; when absolute power is assumed over life and liberty, it will not be wielded with destructive sway!

Skeptics of this character abound in society. In some few instances, their incredulity arises from a want of Page xi reflection; but, generally, it indicates a hatred of the light, a desire to shield slavery from the assaults of its foes, a contempt of the colored race, whether bond or free. Such will try to discredit the shocking tales of slaveholding cruelty which are recorded in this truthful Narrative; but they will labor in vain.

DOUGLASS has frankly disclosed the place of his birth, the names of those who claimed ownership in his body and soul, and the names also of those who committed the crimes which he has alleged against them. His statements, therefore, may easily be disproved, if they are untrue. Before boggs dies, he gives katniss one final order: "don't trust them. Data for 3 of the isotopes are shown in the table. Use these data to calculate the Recycling paper reduces water use.

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