Leadership Quote by Roscoe Conkling

A Victorian-era pep talk dressed up as a woodshop proverb, Roscoe Conkling's line is meant to make righteousness sound muscular. "Hew" does a lot of work: it evokes an ax, a straight grain, a man exerting force to shape stubborn material. Politics becomes carpentry, morality becomes geometry. The phrase flatters its subject as someone who doesn't merely believe in the "right" but can carve it into the world with steady hands.

The second half, "let the chips fly where they may", supplies the swagger. It's consequence-blind on purpose, a declaration that collateral damage isn't a reason to pause. Conkling isn't promising kindness; he's promising resolve. That's the subtext: if opponents complain about the mess, the mess itself becomes proof of integrity. Chips are framed as inevitable byproducts of serious principle, not evidence of recklessness or indifference.

Context matters because Conkling, a dominant New York Republican and patronage-era power broker, lived in a political culture where "principle" was often a brand as much as a compass. This is the language of the Stalwart wing: discipline, loyalty, and a moralized posture against compromise, delivered with the self-assurance of a machine that believed it was synonymous with order. It's also a rhetorical preemptive strike. If the policy fight gets ugly, Conkling has already written the story: ugliness equals courage, resistance equals hypocrisy, and anyone asking for nuance is just trying to sand down the "line of right."