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Rhetorical Analysis Of The Gettysburg Address

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As sixteenth President of the United States, Abraham Lincoln, in his speech, the Gettysburg Address, establishes that America needs to come together to fix its wounds. Lincoln’s purpose is to explain the fact that although during the time of the Civil War and America’s weakness, if we banded together as one nation, we can fix everything that was haywire in the country. He adopts a sympathetic tone in order to move the audience and sway their decisions in teaming up. Lincoln begins his speech with the quote, “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal” (Lincoln, Abraham). Pertaining to the Founding Fathers, in this opening line in his speech Lincoln uses Pathos as a clear way to initially connect with the people of the nation. His use of the Founding Fathers credibility is to have the audience understand that the people before Lincoln, the fathers, had already done so much for the nation. They gave all men the right to be equal. During the Civil War the south fought the north which created the sense that not all men were equal. So, having Lincoln bring up the fact that the Founding Fathers gave all men the right to be equal, created an uplifting mood in his audience due to the fact that we were going to end this war to bring the fathers’ words to truth. Continuing in his speech, Lincoln states the words, “we cannot dedicate – we cannot

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