Hunter Jenkins
Ms. Bunje
AP Essay #1
October 5, 2012
Benjamin Banneker, the son and grandson of former slaves was a staunch activist in the movement to proliferate the academic development of African Americans. Banneker was born in 1731, and lead an unusual life of acheivemnets such as he was an artist, astronomer and a writer. He belived that his race should not deter him from reaching intellectual greatness. Bannekers thesis: “…you should at the same time counteract his mercies in deataining by fraud and violence so numerous a part of my brethren under groaning captivity and cruel oppression, that you should at the same time be found guilty of that most criminal act which you professedly detested in others with repsect to yourselves”, is evidence that he appeals to logos, pathos, and ethos and used syntactical structure, and literary devices in his letter to Thomas Jefferson.. Banneker uses ethos because he is a profound and instrumental part of the slavery era. Banneker is African American but is writing his paper not as a ‘negro’ but as a scholar. He writes to Jefferson in his own language and relays his feelings as to how he feeld that jeffereson is the one who deserves to be called a criminal and three fifths of a person not slaves. Banneker uses specific diction such as “brethren’ and ‘groaning’ to further empahsis his main argument that: Jefferson says that all men are created equal but yet you still continue to enforce slavery. Anaphora, a literary device, is constantly used in “was a time in which”, to stress his key ideas on Slavery. This not only provides a more direct route of persuasion, but also shows the
