The tone of Up from Slavery is hopeful, deferential, and persuasive. While some persuasive writers use aggressive rhetoric and heavy-handed social and/or political analysis, Washington attempts to move his readers primarily through respectful and gently emotional appeals.
For example, during his well-known “cast down your buckets where you are” speech (reproduced in full in Chapter 14), he encourages white listeners to cast their buckets down alongside Black Americans (meaning build relationships with them), using a simultaneously deferential and persuasive tone:
Casting down your bucket among my people, helping and encouraging them as you are doing on these grounds, and to education of head, hand, and heart, you will find that they will buy your surplus land, make blossom the waste places in your fields, and run your factories. While doing this, you can be sure in the future, as in the past, that you and your families will be surrounded by the most patient, faithful, law-abiding, and unresentful people that the world has seen.
Here Washington is trying to inspire white Americans to see Black Americans as deserving of respect and, rather than lambasting them for their racism, speaks to them calmly about the positives that could come from such an alliance. Washington’s hopeful tone comes across here as well, as he notes that Black Americans will prove themselves to be “the most patient, faithful, law-abiding, and unresentful people that the world has seen.”
It is worth noting that Washington’s critics from within the Black community would likely have taken issue with his tone here (and throughout Up from Slavery), viewing it as condescending toward Black Americans and overly deferential toward white Americans.
