Numerous biographies of Jefferson Davis were penned; besides the fact that, before, there have been no great research of his public discourse as president of the Confederacy. R. Jarrod Atchison’s A battle of Words makes use of techniques from rhetorical conception and public deal with to assist resolution a query that has intrigued students from various disciplines because the cave in of the Confederacy: what function, if any, did Davis play within the cave in of accomplice nationalism?

Most discussions of Davis and nationalism specialise in the army results of his arguable wartime judgements. A conflict of Words focuses much less on army results and argues in its place that, within the context of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis’s rhetorical management must have been accountable for articulating a imaginative and prescient for the nation—including the middle tenets of its id, the values the kingdom may still carry expensive, the foundations it may by no means compromise, and the ambitions it may set for its destiny. unquestionably, Davis possessed the abilities essential to make a persuasive public argument. it truly is accurately simply because Davis’s oratory talents have been so robust that there's room to pass judgement on how he used them. in brief, being a good orator isn't really synonymous with profitable rhetorical leadership.

Atchison posits that Davis’s preliminary successes restricted his rhetorical suggestions later within the battle. A struggle of Words concludes that, in spite of everything, Davis’s rhetorical management used to be a failure simply because he was once not able to articulate a coherent accomplice id in mild of the sacrifices continued via the population for you to maintain the warfare effort.