Patrick Henry's Speech In The Virginia Convention

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Patrick Henry uses strong emotions and rhetorical devices to move his audience. In his speech “Speech in the Virginia Convention” delivered in 1775, he uses metaphors and rhetorical questions to create a sense of urgency to convince the members of the Virginia Convention to support war with Great Britain.
Henry uses a comparison in order to make the issue more than a decision to fight or not. When he tells the members of the convention that this is an issue of “freedom or slavery”, he shifts that focus of the decision that needs to be made. He compares nit fighting and staying under British rule to being enslaved since the king is taking more and more of the colonists’ rights. This would have made the men in the room feel uneasy and nervous