Green’s Dictionary of Slang

(US/Aus.) a farmer, an unsophisticated rustic.

1863		‘Edmund Kirke’ Life in Dixie’s Land 62: ‘Rail-splitter!’ Then he’s a nigger, shore.
1868		Brudder Bones’s Stump Speeches 29: Shall this mighty temple of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness be split asunder because a rail splitter happens to be voted into the old arm-chair of Washington?
1886		Salt Lake Herald (UT) 18 Nov. 4/2: Some of our greatest Presidents have come from the humbler classes [...] the rail-splitter Grant.
1894		Dallas Dly Chron. (OR) 31 Mar. 1/1: College professors might have stigmatized him as a railsplitter.
1904		Heppner Gaz. (OR) 29 Sept. 1/4: Many a good railsplitter has been spoiled to make a professional dupe.
1914		Day Book (Chicago) 25 May 3/2: What did Abraham Lincoln, an uneducated railsplitter, know about war?
1921		Labor World (Duluth, MN) 10 Sept. 2/5: America, through safeguarding of individual liberty, gives equal opportunity. A railsplitter becomes president.
1940		(ref. to 1870s) B. Appel People Talk (1972) 328: They called him a rail splitter.
1957		H.B. Allen ‘Pejorative Terms for Midwest Farmers’ in AS XXXIII:4 265: [...] rail splitter.
1965		L. Haylen Big Red 186: A couple of rail splitters living out at the Five Mile.