Frederick Douglass Use Of Ethos Pathos Logos

In the year of 1776, when the founding fathers confirmed their commitment to the inalienable rights of life and liberty, they opted to ignore the question of how slavery would piece into those newfangled ideals. Eventually, however, it became impossible to ignore the blatant violations of humanity in a country that was founded upon the principles of freedom. Tensions between the oppressive South and the opposing North rose to a point that the nation had become one that was divided against itself and threatened to break apart. The response to this national crisis was a revolutionary new type of literature with the objective of overthrowing slavery. The authors of these anti-slavery texts used logical, ethical and emotional rhetoric to confront their audiences with the cruelty and destructiveness of

By clearly establishing logos, ethos and pathos, Douglass uses numerous rhetorical devices to aid him in his argument against slavery. In his autobiography, Frederick Douglass uses many strategies and examples that make logical sense to the reader and communicates them by creating a logos, or “logical appeal”, that describes the clarity of the claim and the logic of its supporting details. One way that Douglass establishes the immorality of his situation is through the use of irony to reveal the flaws in the logic of slavery. For example, when Douglass was owned by a man named Colonel Lloyd, his attention was brought to the injustice served to a pair of slaves that were in charge of their master’s prized horses: “It was by no means easy employment; for in nothing was Colonel Lloyd more particular than in the management of his horses. The slightest inattention to these was unpardonable, and was visited upon those, under whose care they were placed, with the severest punishment…They were frequently whipped when least deserving...Everything depended upon the looks of the horses, and the state of Colonel Lloyd’s own mind when the horses were