Throughout “Civil Disobedience” Thoreau questions the American Government as well as showcasing his disdain fit the laws he felt were unjust. Thoreau creates an appealing argument to his audience by incorporating various literacy and rhetorical devices. He uses rhetorical questions, logical appeals, and allusions to convince his audience that civil disobedience is sometimes needed to provide positive change.
Civil disobedience is defined as a form of peaceful protest as an outcry for unjust laws to be reformed. Thoreau uses syntax in his civil disobedience by concealing facts within the passages, he instead made the statements based on his opinion. This extraction from civil disobedience, Thoreau states “Others- as most legislators, politicians, lawyers, ministers, and office-holders- serve the state chiefly with their heads; and, as they rarely make any moral distinctions, they are as likely to serve the devil, without intending it, as God.” Thoreau ingeniously disembodied himself from the government and recipients. Thoreau also uses metaphors and similes to unmask the actual thoughts of the government and how they felt for soldiers and veterans. An infamous quote from Thoreau shows his support for civil disobedience ” That government is best which governs least.” What Thoreau means is that the government’s purpose should work to the benefit of the human conscience; He believed that the government system steals the right to individual life and personal experience.
Thoreau uses logical appeals in many of his works. Thoreau logically establishes his opinion that “the government is useless and takes power away from citizens”. Thoreau also uses the pathos logical appeal when he expresses that he believed that the American inhabitants could have prevented a war however they were constrained by the government.
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In conclusion, Thoreau uses many rhetorical devices in civil disobedience to expose the government for masking the general public’s “full potential”. Thoreau heavily believed the government controlled the country’s population and as a result Thoreau opted to go to jail for not paying his taxes in protest to slavery and the Mexican-American war. Thoreau believed in civil disobedience so much that he “declared that if the government required people to participate in injustice by obeying unjust laws,then people should “break the laws” even if they ended up in prison. “Under a government which imprisons any unjustly,” he asserted, “the true place for a just man is also a prison.” (Constitutional Rights Foundation). Thoreau felt that failing to pay his taxes as a defiance to the government wasn’t enough and that a person of conscience must act.
