Gettysburg Address Rhetorical Analysis

Abraham Lincoln was our president during the Civil War who wrote Gettysburg Address. Dr. Martin Luther King was a Civil Rights leader who gave the I have a Dream speech by LIncoln Memorial. President Lincoln and Dr. King both addressed the issue of freedom in their speeches. Both used rhetorical devices such as, repetition and parallelism. Each speech had its own purpose.Lincoln’s purpose was to finish the war the north had started; while Dr. King’s was to demand a change for blacks across America. This paper will analyze Lincoln’s and King’s speeches and rhetorical devices that they used to achieve their purpose.
Dr. King gave his speech at the Lincoln memorial. The purpose of his speech was to demand an urgent change and to take what he said back to the cities. To get the change and influence on the audience, he used rhetorical devices such as repetition and parallelism to support his purpose. “Go back to Mississippi, go back to Alabama, go back to South Carolina, go back to Georgia, go back to Louisiana, go back to the slums and ghettos of our northern cities, knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed. Let us not wallow in the valley of despair.” The rhetorical device in this
He persuades the crowd by using rhetorical devices. One example of the devices are “great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived or so dedicated, can long endure. He persuades by using great as an adjective showing how important the war is and that it worth fighting for so that all men can be free and how the nation is being tested if it will state together oR not. “That the nation , shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people by the people for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” Lincoln states that if we finish the war there will be anew and so that the nation will not fall