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Kiltannan, managed by Harry’s great great grandfather John Robb after it was burned to the ground by Irish patriots/terrorists.

I dearly want to write a book that could measure up to this ridiculously epic title.  

I also have an ambition to write some eccentric books on education, human sexuality and religion. I nibbled around these subjects this summer in a biographical prologue of sorts called Not Your Usual Republican. Being an indifferent salesmen I’ll probably give them away at a high school reunion at the end of the month.

My forte is 800-word long columns, not books. NYUR was a collection of columns with a heavy emphasis on the Republican Party’s penchant for RINO hunting. The party of Trump would put Abe Lincoln down in an instant.

I’m imagining this column as the beginning of the unwieldy and unwritten book above. The 163 years mentioned in the title takes me back to the Robb half of my mother’s family. 

They landed in New York Harbor in April of 1861. On entering an outgoing boat shouted the latest news, “South Carolina has fired on Fort Sumpter.”

Officially the fort is spelled without a “p.” Abe Lincoln mostly wrote it with a p, so I have too.

John Robb, who took his family to America, got a preview of war in Ireland. He managed an estate, Kiltannan. Owned by an absentee English landlord, the land had probably belonged to them since Queen Elizabeth and later the fanatical protestant leader Oliver Cromwell conquered the Irish. 

After slaughtering enough Catholics, well-connected Brits got choice bits of the Emerald Isle. For several generations they kept poverty-stricken Irish and sullen leprechauns under their thumbs.

A cousin sent me a story from an 1847 broadside about my great-great grandfather. Irish patriots killed one of the Kiltannan estate’s prize bulls. The story quoted the message carved into the bull’s bloody hide. It told Robb to get the hell out if he didn’t want to end up looking like the bull. 

I don’t know the chronology from 1847 to the Robb family’s departure in 1861, however, 1847 was smack dab in the middle of the calamitous Irish potato famine. Tiny Ireland lost twice as many people to starvation as the continental USA did during the Civil War. The Irish put Kiltannan to the torch.

I only read four chapters into John Kelly’s history of the famine titled The Graves are Walking. The title evokes the sense of desperate people so weakened by starvation they did not have the strength to dig graves deep enough to spare the dead from ravenous animals.  Better to think of the missing bones from looted graves as spirits walking the moors.

A quarter of Irish Catholics found a precarious refuge in America. This resulted in that era’s Donald Trumps creating the “American” or “No Nothing Party.”  They wanted to send the Catholics packing because America should have been reserved for good Americans who had stolen the land fair and square themselves. 

Today, the Republican legislature of Oklahoma doesn’t want public school children to know that the territory given to Indians for as long as the grass grows stopped growing grass when my mother’s McLatchey ancestors lined up on the word’s longest starting line. It was the Kansas/Oklahoma border where the Oklahoma land rush began with horses and wagons racing full tilt to snatch  land back from the Indians.

John Robb’s son, Thomas, was conceived about the time Kiltannan’s bull was slaughtered. He was 12 when he landed in the New York, whose banks had financed southern slaveholders. 

However anti-Catholic 12-year-old Thomas Robb had been he became an ardent supporter of Abraham Lincoln. His son, my grandfather, George Robb, wrote of his father that he was a proud “black Republican” all his life. That was the taunt thrown at Republicans because they failed to despise freed slaves like civilized southerners did. Thomas Robb owned that slur proudly.

There is much more I could and should write to address the ridiculously long title above. The Republican Party stood above the racism that Donald Trump is trying to revive by championing ignorance. 

I may never get to this book but here at least I’ve made a stab at explaining why I should write it. I confess, I don’t see how the Party of Lincoln can ever get past what Donald Trump has done to sully its reputation. 

In the meantime – Go Kamala!

Harry Welty defies gravity in his own mind at: lincolndemocrat.com