"Splitter" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... session, which closed in the failure of all peaceful measures to restore the Union, slowly dawned—with but a few hours lacking of the time when Mr. Lincoln would be inaugurated President of the United States—Mr. Wigfall thought proper, in the United States Senate, to sneer at him as "an ex-rail-splitter, an ex-grocery keeper, an ex-flatboat captain, and an ex-Abolition lecturer"—and proceeded to scold and rant at ...
— The Great Conspiracy, Complete • John Alexander Logan
... or run off without splitting clear the whole length of the block. The blocks should be cut eighteen inches long, and split into quarters, and the sap-wood dressed off. It is then ready for the frow—as the instrument used for splitting shingles is called. A good splitter will keep two men shaving and packing. The proper thickness is four to the inch: the packing-frame should be forty inches long, and contain fifty courses of shingles, which make a thousand. The price varies from five shillings ...
— Twenty-Seven Years in Canada West - The Experience of an Early Settler (Volume I) • Samuel Strickland
... bloody noses swelling the horrors of the scene! Thick thwack, cut and hack, helter-skelter, higgledy-piggledy, hurly-burly, head-over-heels, rough-and-tumble! Dunder and blixum! swore the Dutchmen; splitter and splutter! cried the Swedes. Storm the works! shouted Hardkoppig Peter. Fire the mine roared stout Risingh. Tanta-rar-ra-ra! twanged the trumpet of Antony Van Corlear;—until all voice and sound became unintelligible,—grunts of pain, yells of fury, and shouts of triumph mingling ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... Niggers and Yankees were seeking to take the country. One day, after she had visited the kitchen to superintend some domestic affairs, as she pretended, she became very angry without a word being passed, and said—"I think it has come to a pretty pass, that old Lincoln, with his long legs, an old rail splitter, wishes to put the Niggers on an equality with the whites; that her children should never be on an equal footing with a Nigger. She had rather see them dead." As my mother made no reply to her remarks, she stopped talking, and commenced venting her spite ...
— The Story of Mattie J. Jackson • L. S. Thompson
... The rail-splitter upon the sparsely settled lands of Kentucky was fired with a purpose and a recognition of his place among men. He toiled on against hindrances and adversities until he had cut his way to the Capitol of the nation ...
— The American Missionary - Volume 52, No. 3, September, 1898 • Various
... direction, from mere excess of sincerity, most unwillingly I found, in almost every body's words, an unintentional opening left for double interpretations. Undesigned equivocation prevails every where; [10] and it is not the cavilling hair splitter, but, on the contrary, the single-eyed servant of truth, that is most likely to insist upon the limitation of expressions too wide or too vague, and upon the decisive election between meanings potentially double. Not in order to resist or ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... which as yet showed no alloy; the modest, becoming acceptance of illustrious honors paid to him in France. The people saw in this simple, earnest mountaineer the type of American that had made America. They thought of him as coming from that stratum of clay that could be molded into a rail-splitter and, when the need arose, remodeled into the nation's leader. And quickly and unexpectedly, Sergeant York was destined to show by two other deeds, prompted by an inborn eminence, that ...
— Sergeant York And His People • Sam Cowan
... about me and won't let me rest; so I want to build myself a house and lay myself inside it, so that I may have some peace." "Oh, indeed," thought Hans, "I can make use of this one also;" and said to him, "Leave thy house-building alone, and go with me; thou shalt be called Rock-splitter." The man consented, and they all three roamed through the forest, and wherever they went the wild beasts were terrified, and ran away from them. In the evening they came to an old deserted castle, went up into it, and laid themselves down in the hall to sleep. The next morning Hans ...
— Household Tales by Brothers Grimm • Grimm Brothers
... expanding force culminated in the election of Lincoln. Great, indeed, was the change which had already swept over the landscape of American thought and purpose since the despised Birney, in 1844, received only a few thousand votes in the whole United States. Now the Rail-splitter had come! The tocsin of war sounded. The Union was rent. War with its flames of fire and streams of blood devastated the Republic. But the bow of promise was set on the dark background of the receding storm. American slavery was swept into oblivion, and the end of the third quarter ...
— Notable Events of the Nineteenth Century - Great Deeds of Men and Nations and the Progress of the World • Various
... knew whereof he wrote, declares that it was a great misfortune that Lincoln was introduced to the country as a rail-splitter. Americans have no prejudice against humble beginnings, they are proud of self-made men, but there is nothing in the ability to split rails which necessarily qualifies one for the demands of statesmanship. Some of his ...
— The Life of Abraham Lincoln • Henry Ketcham
... ear trumpet; and there were Nick Proctor and his wife, July, from the hills beyond Destruction, seventeen miles over a road that pitched from end to end when it didn't slant from side to side, and took a shag-barked, sharp-shinned, cross-eyed wind-splitter to travel. There sat old Bev Munday, from Blue Cut, who hadn't been that far away from home since Jesse James got after him, with his old brown hat on his head; and it was two to one in the opinion of everybody that he'd keep it there till the sheriff ordered him to lift it off. Hiram Lee, ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... speckillatin' (shiver my timbers! but that last was a pen-splitter), that's not what I sat down to write about. My object in takin' up the ...
— The Lighthouse • Robert Ballantyne
... the letters, messages, and speeches of Lincoln were destroyed except that one letter to Hooker, we should still have a good index to the heart of "The Rail-splitter." ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... Illinois, in a fateful hour, called upon a bewildered people to meet the supreme test whether this was a nation destined to survive or to perish. And it will be remembered that Lincoln's party chose for its banner that earlier device—Republican—which Jefferson had made a sign of power. The "rail splitter" from Illinois united the nationalism of Hamilton with the democracy of Jefferson, and his appeal was clothed in the simple language of the people, not in the sonorous rhetoric which Webster learned in ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard
... drew himself up with smiling ease and posed a moment for the edification of the on-lookers. Sam Turner was the very first to detect the unbearable arrogance of that pose. Princeman eyed the batsman critically, mercilessly even, and delivered the third fatal plate-splitter. ...
— The Early Bird - A Business Man's Love Story • George Randolph Chester
... the rail splitter was born a president; and it is a far cry to a circus rider who was ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... the one over the other, so that the fibres of each lay at right angles with the fibres of the others in immediate contact with it. In the inner table of one scale I reckon nine of these alternating, variously-disposed layers; so that any application of violence, which, in the language of the lath-splitter, would run lengthwise along the grain of four of them, would be checked by the cross grain in five. In other words, the line of the tear in five of the layers was ranged at right angles with the line of the ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... of Lincoln rather than Seward, at the Republican convention in Chicago, was a bitter disappointment to those who felt that the latter was the real leader of the party of moral ideas, and that the rail-splitter was simply an "available" candidate.[843] But Douglas, with keener insight into the character of Lincoln, said to a group of Republicans at the Capitol, "Gentlemen, you have nominated a very able and a very honest man."[844] For ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson |
