Up From Slavery Rhetorical Analysis

Booker T. Washington went down in history as one of the most influential African Americans of the nineteenth century. He was born into slavery on a tobacco plantation in Franklin County, VA. At the time of his birth, slavery ceased to exist in the most Northern States, abolitionists began to demonstrate and influence state governments pushing toward the emancipation and sometimes the relocation of former slaves and descendants (National Park Service, 2016). In his autobiography Up From Slavery, he describes in great detail his experience growing up on the plantation up until the day of his emancipation. He goes through the trying times of the civil war, and the impact it had on his master’s family. Throughout the biography you are able

Washington uses allegory when speaking of the ship lost at sea as the story relates to his wanting the people of his race to be friendly with the white Americans, i.e., “A ship lost at sea for many days suddenly sighted a friendly vessel” (450). This is also used as an extended metaphor throughout the piece, as he compares the bucket, “cast down your bucket”, to the burdens his people are facing, i.e., “I permitted I would repeat what I say to my own race, ‘Cast down your bucket where you are’” (450). The phrase is repeated throughout the entire speech to emphasize how important it is to cast down their hatred and make amends with the white population. He not only tells the blacks to cast down, but he uses exemplification when speaks to the whites of the loyalty they have received from his people when he says, i.e., “Cast down your bucket among these people who have, without strikes and labour wars, tilled your fields, cleared your forests, builded your railroads and cities, and brought forth treasures from the bowels of the earth, and helped make possible this magnificent representation of the progress of the south” (450). He uses a metaphor to describe how difficult the road to success can, which every individual can relate to, including myself, i.e., “remember the path that has led from these to the inventions and productions of agricultural implements, buggies, steam engines, newspapers, books, statuary, carving, paintings, the management of drug stores and banks, has not been trodden without contact with thorns and thistles” (451). Then as he closes the speech, he gives one of the most extraordinary symbols when he says “here bending, as it were, over the altar that represents the results of