railsplitter n.
(US/Aus.) a farmer, an unsophisticated rustic.
![]() | Life in Dixie’s Land 62: ‘Rail-splitter!’ Then he’s a nigger, shore. | |
![]() | 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? | |
![]() | Salt Lake Herald (UT) 18 Nov. 4/2: Some of our greatest Presidents have come from the humbler classes [...] the rail-splitter Grant. | |
![]() | Dallas Dly Chron. (OR) 31 Mar. 1/1: College professors might have stigmatized him as a railsplitter. | |
![]() | Heppner Gaz. (OR) 29 Sept. 1/4: Many a good railsplitter has been spoiled to make a professional dupe. | |
![]() | Day Book (Chicago) 25 May 3/2: What did Abraham Lincoln, an uneducated railsplitter, know about war? | |
![]() | Labor World (Duluth, MN) 10 Sept. 2/5: America, through safeguarding of individual liberty, gives equal opportunity. A railsplitter becomes president. | |
![]() | (ref. to 1870s) People Talk (1972) 328: They called him a rail splitter. | |
![]() | AS XXXIII:4 265: [...] rail splitter. | ‘Pejorative Terms for Midwest Farmers’ in|
![]() | Big Red 186: A couple of rail splitters living out at the Five Mile. |