Gabriel Weyand
Per.1
Slavery a Positive Good by John C. Calhoun
Slavery is a horrible thing, and we all know that. It almost ruined our country. Half of us agreed with it and the other half severely frowned upon it. Many people wrote about what it did to this country, but John C. Calhoun, to me, pictured it best.
I agree with a lot of what he says in ``Slavery a Positive Good``. He said that the decision to end slavery should be made by a council, not just one human being. I agree, because the country was and still isn’t a dictatorship. He believes that if slavery wasn’t abolished by the time it reached the northern states that a war would break out that could destroy the government and the country. He stated in lines 25-28 ``As widely as this incendiary spirit has spread, it has not yet infected this body, or the great mass of the intelligent and business portion of the North; but unless it be speedily stopped, it will spread and work upwards till it brings the two great sections of the Union into deadly conflict.``
The one point that I choose to talk about in this essay that John talked about is the outbreak of war. To me that would have been the biggest threat to the country at that time. It could’ve destroyed this country, and it almost did. Before the Great Depression, the Civil War was the worst time in the U.S. history, because of the war in the country and the great number of lives that were lost, and affected by what had happened.
There are some rhetorical devices that help support his statement in Johns statement in his text. For example, line 25 there is alliteration, it says ``as widely as this incendiary spirit has spread, it has not yet infected this body`` and widely would be the alliteration. Another example of a rhetorical device that explains how bad slavery is a personification in line 30 and they compared it to a ``fell spirit``. He also uses personification in line 34 to describe abolition in which he describes as a...