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William Wilberforce's Informative Speech

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Over hundreds of years, people have continually repeated the statement “The pen is mightier than the sword”. However, only a few people have proven the truth in this statement, including William Wilberforce. Wilberforce’s mastery of rhetoric and passionate Abolition Speech caused the abolition of slavery in Europe without the amount of bloodshed and death caused during the Civil War. In order to successfully persuade people, Wilberforce needed to figure out how to correctly appeal to hundreds of people in order to gain their agreement. Thankfully, he did so successfully by painting an incredibly vivid picture of the horrid conditions that slaves lived in. William Wilberforce peacefully ended slavery by using physical and emotional descriptions in his speech, as well as showing the cruelty that slavers showed to their slaves. William Wilberforce helped his audience to realize the physical conditions that the slaves lived in. Early …show more content…

Around the middle of his speech, Wilberforce calls the slaves “wretched” (Wilberforce), showing his audience the true state of these enslaved people. Additionally, Wilberforce speaks of how the slaves “are so wrung with misery at leaving their country, that it is the constant practice to set sail at night, lest they should be sensible of their departure” (Wilberforce). After this, he tells his audience about how the slaves sing “songs of lamentations” (Wilberforce) and how whenever they sing, they “are always in tears” (Wilberforce). However, Wilberforce continues beyond a simple description for this singing, and tells his audience about how this mournful singing caused the ship’s captain to threaten one of the singers because “the mournfulness of her song was too painful for his feelings” (Wilberforce). This sad tale helped Wilberforce to further convince his audience how the slaves felt while in these

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