To knock any one into a cocked hat is to “use him up” completely.
1833. I … told Tom … I’d knock him into a cocked-hat, if he said another word.—J. K. Paulding, ‘The Banks of the Ohio,’ i. 217 (Lond.).
1838. Not a few [were] knocked clear into a cocked hat.—B. Drake, ‘Tales and Sketches,’ p. 92 (Cincinn.). (Italics in the original.)
1840. Why pummel and beat over again that which is already beaten to a jelly, jammed into a cocked hat, and flung into the middle of next week?—Mr. Wick of Indiana, House of Repr., July 20: Cong. Globe, p. 545.
1843. I had always disbelieved the vulgar saying about “knocked into a cocked hat,”—deeming it, indeed, possible to be knocked out of one; but my infidelity left me in that swamp, when I saw the very odd figures we made after our squeezings, abrasions, and denudings.—B. R. Hall (‘Robert Carlton’), ‘The New Purchase,’ ii. 62–3.
1848. It has completely knocked us all into a cocked hat.—Seba Smith, ‘Major Jack Downing,’ p. 306 (1860).
1848. The very next election in Pennsylvania and Ohio gave [the “stationary Democracy”] such a storm as “knocked them into a cocked hat.”—Mr. Root of Ohio, House of Repr., June 12: Cong. Globe, p. 827.
1852. We will knock them [the groggeries] into a cocked hat.—Ezra T. Benson, at the Tabernacle, Salt Lake City, Sept. 12: ‘Journal of Discourses,’ vi. 248.
1858. We knocked dat ere ‘Massa-do-nuthin’ … into a cocked hat.—Knick. Mag., li. 154 (Feb.).
