e sanctimonious Declaration of Independence presumptuously boasts, “all men are created equal”. If this, in the faltered eyes of nineteenth-century Americans, was true, were some men created less “equal” than others based on the colour of their skin, destined to flee the hypocritical “land of the free” to meet ironic sovereignty? When the Fugitive Slave Act was passed, slaves immigrated to Canada avoid mass recapture and imprisonment. With them joined Mary Ann Shadd Cary, African-American writer and abolitionist. In order to aid the fugitive community and the antislavery movement, she published a newspaper entitled Provincial Freeman. In one editorial, she thoroughly explains the validity of her newspaper’s existence. In this, through various rhetorical devices, Cary establishes her newspaper’s necessity and previously unknown voice to the oppressed “coloured” population of Canada, suggesting that respect stems from understanding.…show more content… From the very first word of the piece, “we”, the audience is included in the subjective minority struggle that the paper accompanies. Their path becomes part of “our wants and grievances”, personalizing a possibly foreign sense of empathy and suffrage. Then Cary, while including the reader still introduces the appeal to “our fellow subjects”, or the non-included audience. This provides the guideline of the omnipresent, but underlying intention of the publishing’s: to allow others to “…know who we are and what we want”, by establishing a “mouthpiece” for the coloured community. This display of credibility in the reader evokes a desire to listen, for it involves careful
