On July 8, 2003, at Goree Island, Senegal, George W. Bush delivered the most important speech on American slavery since Abraham Lincoln. As an example of rhetorical artistry, the speech is a masterpiece, putting the brutality of slavery into historical, political, and theological perspective. Although the speech had deliberative effects--it grew…

In August 1843 Presbyterian minister Henry Highland Garnet delivered his "Address to the Slaves of the United States of America" to the National Convention of Colored Citizens in Buffalo, NY. While often read (and almost as often dismissed) as either an unqualified call for a violent slave rebellion or, at the least, a celebration of…

Discusses Theodore Weld's "American Slavery As It Is," the largest selling antislavery text prior to "Uncle Tom's Cabin." Argues that it signaled a key moment in the abolitionist's efforts to represent slavery. Maintains that it helped to set in place a vocabulary of images that has implications for race relations today. (SR)

Demonstrates the importance of extra-legal texts in contextualizing and challenging judicial authority by analyzing Black Abolitionist responses to "Scott v. Sandford" (the "Dred Scott" decision). Concludes that responses to Dred Scott demonstrate how legally excluded classes may persuasively challenge constitutional authority…

Refutes the dominant interpretation of the British Parliamentary debates on slave trade abolition, examining the argumentative strategies employed. Finds that slavers claimed that abolition would destroy the nation's prosperity, while abolitionists depicted the slave trade as irrational and economically inefficient, thus undermining its economic…

Examines the symbolic oppositions that structure the "Appeal," together with its strategy of crisis taken from Puritan jeremiads. Accounts for Chase's success in pulling together disparate forces of the free North. Explores events which laid the ground for the Republican party and civil war. (RAE)

Frederick Douglass's oration, "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?" is a rhetorical masterwork of irony. It illustrates a strategy for enlisting the liberatory potential inherent in the detached and multiple perspective of irony without allowing that detachment to culminate in political impotence. The speech accomplishes this through opening…

Discusses the coercive controls imposed upon Blacks during slavery, including regimenting their lives, restricting their learning experiences, limiting their opportunities to communicate, and prescribing demeaning role behavior. Rhetorical strategies employed by Blacks included a defensive posture of accommodation and a more aggressive behavior of…

This essay examines the ways in which the rhetoric of the reparations debate elucidates the varying accounts of history favored by Americans of different backgrounds, the political and ideological foundations underlying different perspectives on the nature and uses of history, and the norms guiding public deliberation in the contemporary U.S.…