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Corruption Of Slavery Rhetorical Analysis

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Bloody, Cruel, and demeaning are words that represent slavery. Many inhuman acts taken on the slaves included: separating families, treated like property, working for nothing, and abusive beatings. Slaves lived horrible, poorly treated lives. Frederick Douglass escaped slavery and told his story. In his writing, he shared all the gruesome sights he encountered through his life as a slave. His writing expressed the idea of how corrupt the system of slavery was. By using the rhetorical devices, antithesis, rhetorical questions, and anaphora, Douglass expresses the corruption of slavery through slaves, Christianity, and slaveholders.
The slaves display the corruption of slavery through Douglass’s descriptive words and rhetorical devices. Douglass …show more content…

He expresses this through the use of rhetorical questions. A rhetorical question Douglass used was when he asked “Does a slave look dissatisfied? It is said, he has the devil in him, and it must be whipped out. Does he speak loudly when spoken to by his master” (Douglass 62). This rhetorical question is connected to Christianity because of the reference to the devil. The devil is the worst of God and highly disliked in the religion. By saying that there is the devil in slavery Douglass wants to shows the corruption of Christianity. Another example of Douglass’s use of rhetorical questions is when he asks, “I am left in the hottest hell of unending slavery. O God, save me! God, deliver me! Is there any God? Why am I a slave” (Douglass 52). This is a rhetorical question because he is asking if there is any God, and asking why he is a slave. Douglass is speaking to God in this quote, showing his belief is Christianity. Then he goes on and uses the rhetorical question to question God’s existence. This rhetorical question show the corruption of slavery because he was questioning God’s existence. This is a big deal for the time that the book was written. Christianity was a strong religious belief; nobody would question the existence of God, he was just there. But, Douglass questioned it. This is corrupt because his life as a slave was so corrupt that his beliefs in Christianity

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