A War of Words: The Rhetorical Leadership of Jefferson Davis by R. Jarrod Atchison

Numerous biographies of Jefferson Davis were penned; in spite of the fact that, earlier, there have been no sizeable research of his public discourse as president of the Confederacy. R. Jarrod Atchison’s A warfare of Words makes use of recommendations from rhetorical thought and public tackle to assist solution a query that has intrigued students from quite a few disciplines because the cave in of the Confederacy: what position, if any, did Davis play within the cave in of accomplice nationalism?

Most discussions of Davis and nationalism concentrate on the army results of his arguable wartime judgements. A warfare of Words focuses much less on army results and argues as an alternative that, within the context of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis’s rhetorical management must have been answerable for articulating a imaginative and prescient for the nation—including the center tenets of its identification, the values the kingdom should still carry expensive, the rules it may by no means compromise, and the pursuits it may set for its destiny. certainly, Davis possessed the abilities essential to make a persuasive public argument. it's accurately simply because Davis’s oratory talents have been so robust that there's room to pass judgement on how he used them. briefly, being an outstanding orator isn't synonymous with winning rhetorical leadership.

Atchison posits that Davis’s preliminary successes restricted his rhetorical concepts later within the warfare. A battle of Words concludes that, after all, Davis’s rhetorical management was once a failure simply because he used to be not able to articulate a coherent accomplice id in mild of the sacrifices persevered by means of the population with a view to maintain the struggle effort.