The Healy family of Georgia became notable in U.S. history because the siblings achieved much in the second half of the nineteenth century, most within the Catholic Church. They were born in Jones County, Georgia to Mary Eliza, a mulatto slave, and her common-law husband, Michael Morris Healy, an Irish Catholic immigrant from County Roscommon, who became a wealthy cotton planter. As they were born into slavery, the children were prohibited from being educated in Georgia, although they were majority European in ancestry. The wealthy planter sent his mixed-race children to the North for education to ensure their futures. The sons attended a combination of Quaker and later Catholic schools in New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts, with Patrick and Sherwood earning doctorates at Saint-Sulpice in Paris, France. The three daughters were educated at Catholic convent schools in Montreal, Canada.
Of the nine children who lived to adulthood, three of the sons became ordained Catholic priests and educators while all three daughters became nuns. James Augustine Healy became the first American bishop of African descent and Eliza Healy attained the rank of Mother Superior. Michael joined the United States Revenue Cutter Service, a predecessor of the U.S. Coast Guard. Today he is claimed as the first person of African-American descent to command a federal ship. Three of the Healy children have been individually honored by the naming of various buildings, awards and a ship for them. The former site of the Healy family's plantation near Macon, Georgia is now called Healy Point. It includes the Healy Point Country Club.[1]
Born into slavery, the children were considered mulatto in the South, a census classification that recognized mixed race. With three-quarter European ancestry, the children varied in features and complexions, but all were baptized Catholic in the North and were accepted as white Irish Americans.[α] Their stories have intrigued historians and sociologists for their high achievements as the children of an immigrant and enslaved woman. They gained higher educations and most became prominent in the Catholic Church, they negotiated racial issues, and they created alliances with Catholic Church officials and its institutions. The roles of Catholic Church representatives who mentored the young Healy men and women has attracted interest. James M. O'Toole's Passing for White: Race, Religion, and the Healy Family, 1820-1920 (2003) explores many of those issues. A. D. Powell's Passing for Who You Really Are (2005) takes issue with what she calls the distortion of the past by 20th-century activists, who practice their own kind of one-drop rule. She thinks it is inappropriate to claim as African American individuals such as the Healys, who historically identified and were accepted as Irish American, although they acknowledged their multi-racial heritage.[2] Since the late 20th century, several of the Healys have been noted and celebrated as the "first African Americans" to achieve certain positions.
Contents |
One of Healy's sons found through genealogical research that their father Michael Morris Healy was born on September 20, 1796 in the village of Athlone in the County Roscommon. He emigrated to the United States, possibly by way of Canada, arriving in the 1818. Through good fortune in a Georgia land lottery and later acquisitions, he eventually acquired 1,500 acres (6.1 km2) of good "bottomland" near the Ocmulgee River in Jones County, across from the market town of Macon. He became one of the more prominent and successful planters in an area known for cotton, and owned 49 slaves for his labor-intensive enterprise.[1]
Among these was a 16-year-old girl named Mary Eliza (whose surname has been recorded both as Smith and Clark), whom he took as his common-law wife in 1829, when he was age 33.[3] His wife Mary Eliza Healy has been described in various accounts as "slave" and "former slave", and as mulatto and African American (which covers mixed-race). Commonly in the South, persons of visible or known African racial heritage were considered to be black, or African American (using modern terminology). By that criteria, Mary Eliza and all the Healy children were black, although the children were three-quarters European or more in ancestry. The term "mulatto" was also in use, which recognized mixed race. In Louisiana, mulattoes formed a third class, known as Louisiana creoles; they gained education and property, sometimes as a result of settlements on women and children in the system of plaçage.[4]
The union of Michael Morris and Mary Eliza Healy was unusual for being relatively formalized, although unions were common between white men and mixed-race or black women. He was not the only wealthy white man to take an African-American wife and to provide for the education of their children. For example, shortly before the start of the American Civil War, nearly all the 200 young men at Wilberforce College in southern Ohio, established by white and black Ohio Methodist leaders for the education of blacks, were mixed-race sons of wealthy white planters from the South.[5]
At the time, Georgia law (and most other states) prohibited marriage between whites and blacks.[1] The couple lived together as man and wife from 1829 until their deaths a few months apart in 1850. During that time, they had ten children, nine of whom survived to adulthood.[3]
Under the laws, if their mother had been a slave at their births, the children of the Healys would also have been considered slaves, according to the principle of partus by which children were assigned the status of their mother. Various accounts of her status conflict. The laws in Georgia prohibited the education of the children because they were considered black, whether slave or free. Such anti-literacy laws had been instituted in southern states following Nat Turner's slave rebellion in 1831.
To overcome obstacles for the children, Healy sent them to northern states to attend school as soon as each was old enough. (He sent the girls to a French-Canadian convent school in Montreal.) The oldest son James, born in 1830, was sent to Flushing, New York in 1837 where he attended a Quaker school. He later transferred to another Quaker school in Burlington, New Jersey. Several of James' younger brothers followed him in this path. The Quaker schools presented different issues for the boys. They faced criticism because their father owned slaves, which was in conflict with Quaker principles of equality of men, and some discrimination as sons of an Irish Catholic immigrant at a time of greatly increased immigration during the Great Famine.
Around 1844, the senior Michael Healy met John Bernard Fitzpatrick, the Catholic bishop of the Diocese of Boston. He learned of the new College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, which was then accepting children of grammar school age. In 1844, Healy sent his sons James 14, Hugh 12, Patrick 10, and Sherwood 8, to be enrolled at Holy Cross. Michael, then only 6 years old, followed them a few years later, enrolling in 1849 at Holy Cross.[1]
The Healy parents intended to sell their plantation and move to the North with their three youngest children.[1] When the parents each died unexpectedly in 1850, Hugh Healy risked his safety to return to Georgia to take his three youngest siblings to the North, while executors of his parents' estate liquidated the plantation and other assets. Safe in New York, Hugh arranged for the three youngest children to be baptized as Catholics in the Church of St. Francis Xavier on June 13, 1851.[6] After graduating from Holy Cross, Hugh had gone to New York. He was building a hardware business in the city, but died as a result of an infection contracted after a boating accident in the Hudson River at age 21.[1]
James Augustine Healy (1830–1900) graduated valedictorian of the Holy Cross's first graduating class in 1849. In 1962, Holy Cross christened its newest dormitory Healy Hall in honor of James A. Healy. He became the first American with African ancestry to become a Roman Catholic Bishop in the United States, ordained as Bishop of Portland, Maine on June 2, 1875.[7] During his time in Maine, at a period of growth in Catholic immigration, Healy oversaw the establishment of 60 new churches, 68 missions, 18 convents and 18 schools.
Patrick Francis Healy (1834–1910) became a Jesuit, and was the first American with African ancestry to earn a PhD, at Saint-Sulpice Seminary in Paris. He was named a dean at Georgetown University in 1866. At the age of 39, on July 31, 1874, he assumed the presidency of what was then the largest Catholic college in the United States.[8]
Patrick Healy's influence on Georgetown University was so far-reaching that he is often referred to as the school's "second founder," following Archbishop John Carroll. Healy helped transform the small nineteenth-century college into a major university for the twentieth century. He modernized the curriculum by requiring courses in the sciences, particularly chemistry and physics. He expanded and upgraded the schools of law and medicine. In the antebellum years, the college had drawn most of its students from the South; four-fifths of the alumni fought as Confederates. In the later nineteenth century, it began to draw more students from the Northeast, which had a higher rate of Catholic immigration. During Healy's tenure, the college adopted the colors of blue and grey as a symbol of reconciliation for the nation.[8]
Michael Augustine Healy (1838–1904) was younger than brothers James, Hugh, Patrick, and Sherwood. Unhappy and rebellious at Holy Cross, he was sent at the age of 15, to a seminary in France. However, he preferred a more adventurous life, and fled the school the following year.[1] In England, he signed aboard the American East Indian Clipper Jumna as a cabin boy in 1854. He quickly became an expert seaman. Soon he rose to the rank of officer on merchant vessels.[9]
In 1864, Michael Healy returned to his family, by then based in Boston. He applied for a commission in the Revenue Cutter Service and was accepted as a Third Lieutenant, with a commission signed by President Abraham Lincoln.[9][10] Michael served with the US Revenue Service along the 20,000-mile (32,000 km) coastline of the new territory following the Alaska Purchase of 1867.[11] In 1880, he became the first American of African descent to be assigned command of a US government ship. During the last two decades of the 19th century, Captain Healy was essentially the federal government’s law enforcement presence in the vast territory.[9] In his twenty years of service between San Francisco and Point Barrow, he acted as: judge, doctor, and policeman to Alaskan natives, merchant seamen and whaling crews.[12] Commissioned in 1999, the U.S. Coast Guard research icebreaker USCGC Healy (WAGB-20) is named in his honor.[9]
Eliza Healy (1846–1918), educated at St. Johns, Quebec, joined her family in Boston for several years. She felt a calling to the religious life and returned to Montreal, where she entered the novitiate in the Congregation of Notre Dame in 1874 and took her vows in 1876.[13] They were the teaching order of her school and had been established in 1653 by a French nun. After teaching in schools in Quebec and Ontario, Sister Mary Magdalen was first named as superior of a convent in 1895 in Huntington, Quebec, where she served until 1897.[13] In 1903 Healy was appointed school administrator and Mother Superior at a Catholic convent, at Villa Barlow, St. Albans, Vermont, the first woman of African-American descent to achieve the position.[1][14] In her 15 years there, Sister Mary Magdalen restored the complex's facilities and finances.[13] In her last year, she served as Mother Superior for the Congregation of Notre Dame at the Academy of Our Lady of the Blessed Sacrament on Staten Island, New York, where she restored their finances.[1]
All three of the Healy girls: Martha, Josephine, and Eliza, were educated beginning as children at the convent school of the Congregation of Notre Dame in Montreal. They chose to become nuns, following the women and the institution that had been influential in their lives.[1]
Because of their mother's mixed ancestry, the Healy children were more than half European as well as partially African in ancestry. Much evidence exists that, with the social capital of their education and father's wealth, all of the Healy children were accepted into northern U.S. and Canadian society as "white" Irish Americans.[1]
Martha and Michael, who married and had children, each chose European-American partners of Irish Catholic descent. Their religion had been integral to their lives and they wanted to ensure that future generations of their family would continue to be part of white Catholic society.[1]
In 1865, Michael Healy married Mary Jane Roach, the daughter of Irish Catholic immigrants. They had one child, a son named Frederick, born in 1870.[1] According to James M. O'Toole, the historian who wrote about the family and the conundrum of race, Michael Healy
"...repeatedly referred to white settlers [in Alaska] as "our people," and was able to pass this racial identity on to a subsequent generation. His teenage son Fred, who accompanied his father on a voyage in 1883, scratched his name into a rock on a remote island above the Arctic Circle, proudly telling his diary that he was the first "white boy" to do so."