SOURCE: Henry, David. “Garrison at Philadelphia: The ‘Declaration of Sentiments’ as Instrumental Rhetoric.” In Rhetoric and Political Culture in Nineteenth-Century America, edited by Thomas W. Benson, pp. 113-29. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1997.

In the following essay, Henry conducts a rhetorical analysis of the American Anti-Slavery Society's “Declaration of Sentiments,” drafted by Garrison, and studies its links to the Declaration of Independence.

In the opening chapter of Rhetorical Questions, Edwin Black attends to the relationship between his most recent book and the path breaking Rhetorical Criticism: A Study in Method. “One conviction that influenced that old book,” he writes, “has influenced also the present one, a conviction that the intervening twenty-five years have only strengthened. It is that almost all talk about criticism is sterile. Criticism lives only in acts of criticism, not in oracular abstractions about it. Goering once said,” Black continues, “that when he heard...