The Healy family was an Irish-American and African-American family notable for the high achievements of its first generation of children, who were born into slavery in Georgia in the second half of the nineteenth century.
Among them were James, America's first known Black Catholic priest (and bishop); Patrick, the first Black Jesuit, PhD, and university president (he was the 29th president of Georgetown); Michael, the first African American to command a federal ship; and Eliza, one of the first Black Catholic mother superiors.
History
Family background (Michael and Mary) The most recent immigrant ancestor, Michael Morris Healy, was born on September 20, 1796, in the town of Athlone in County Roscommon, Ireland. He emigrated to the United States, possibly by way of Canada, arriving in 1818. Through good fortune in a Georgia land lottery and later acquisitions, he eventually acquired more than of good "bottomland" near the Ocmulgee River in Jones County, across the river from the market town of Macon. He became one of the more prominent and successful planters in an area known for cotton, and eventually owned 49-60Albert S. Foley, Bishop Healy: Beloved Outcaste, Farrar, Straus & Geroux, 1954, p. 8. Note: Foley says that Eliza was a mulatto slave born in Georgia. slaves for his labor-intensive enterprise.
Among these was a 16-year-old girl named Mary Eliza (whose surname has been recorded both as Smith and Clark).Eileen A. Sullivan, "Review: Look away, Dixieland", of David T. Gleeson, The Irish in the South 1815–1877, Irish Literary Supplement, September 22, 2002, carried on Highbeam Research, accessed February 7, 2011 Mary Eliza Smith/Clark, has been described in various accounts as "slave" and "former slave", and as mulatto, octoroon, and African American (which includes mixed-race). In the South, children born to slave women had the legal status of slaves, regardless of their paternity, because of the principle in slave law of partus sequitur ventrem, which was adopted in the late 17th century throughout the South. They were legally slaves, regardless of their ancestry or religion. As shorthand mixed-race slaves were sometimes classified as black, but the term "mulatto", which recognized mixed race, was also used in census records for both slaves and free persons. This term was used in the U.S. census until 1930, when it was removed because of opposition from the Southern block in Congress. In Louisiana, free people of color formed a third class in the colonial era, and their descendants have become known as Creoles of Color. These free mixed-race people gained education and property before the American Civil War, sometimes as a result of settlements on women and children in the system of plaçage.
The union of Michael Morris and Mary Eliza Healy was relatively formalized; unions were common between white men and mixed-race or black women. He was not the only white man to take an African-American wife or concubine and to have the wealth to provide for the education of their mixed-race children. For example, shortly before the start of the American Civil War, nearly all the 200 young men at Wilberforce University in southern Ohio, established by white and black Ohio Methodist leaders for the education of blacks, were mixed-race sons of wealthy white Southern planters.Horace Talbert, The Sons of Allen: Together with a Sketch of the Rise and Progress of Wilberforce University, Wilberforce, Ohio, 1906, p. 273, Documenting the South, 2000, University of North Carolina, accessed July 25, 2008
At the time, Georgia law (and that of most other states) prohibited interracial marriage, as well as education of all blacks, free or slave. Some accounts suggest that Mary Eliza was freed but it was unlikely.
The state legislature required a separate act for each manumission desired by a slaveholder, even for one's family members. These difficulties essentially prohibited White fathers in the South freeing their slave children and concubines. But the Healy couple lived together as husband and wife from 1829 until their deaths a few months apart in 1850, and they had intended to move to the free North with their youngest children. During that time they had ten children, nine of whom survived to adulthood.
The Healy children The laws in Georgia prohibited the education of blacks, 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 his children, Healy explored schools in the North in 1837. Two of his sisters and their families had settled in New York City, but boarding schools there would not accept the mixed-race James, the oldest son.Foley (1954), Bishop Healy, p. 11 Born in 1830, James was enrolled in a Quaker school in Flushing, New York in 1837. After completing elementary school, he attended a Quaker preparatory school in Burlington, New Jersey. Some of James's younger brothers followed him in this path. At the Quaker schools, the boys faced criticism because their father was a slaveholder, which was in conflict with Quaker principles of equality of men. They also faced discrimination as Irish Catholics at a time of greatly increased immigration to the United States 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 accepting children of grammar school age in its boarding preparatory school. In 1844, Healy sent his sons James (14), Hugh (12), Patrick (10), and Sherwood (8), to be enrolled at Holy Cross, and they all graduated from the college. The fifth son, Michael, then only 6 years old, followed a few years later, enrolling in 1849 at Holy Cross.
The Healy parents intended to sell their plantation and move to the North with their three youngest children. When the parents each died unexpectedly in 1850, their son Hugh Healy risked his freedom to return to Georgia from New York to take his three youngest siblings to the North. Still legally a slave in Georgia, he could have been captured by slave catchers and sold in the slave trade. After graduating from Holy Cross, Hugh Healy had moved to New York City, where he was building a hardware business. Executors of his parents' estate liquidated the plantation and other assets, while Hugh returned to New York with his younger siblings. There he arranged for them to be baptized as Catholics in the Church of St. Francis Xavier on June 13, 1851."Eliza Healy (Sister Mary Magdalen)", Blackpast.org Hugh Healy died at age 21 as a result of an infection contracted after a boating accident in the Hudson River.
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, the Healy children were accepted into northern U.S. and Canadian society as "white" Irish Americans.
Careers Most of the second-generation descendants became prominent as leaders within the Catholic Church. They were mixed-race children of Mary Eliza Smith, a mulatto slave, and her common-law husband, Michael Morris Healy, an Irish Catholic immigrant from County Roscommon. He became a wealthy cotton planter in Jones County.
Majority White in ancestry, the children varied in appearance, with Alexander being the darkest and others being more or less able to pass. Georgia prohibited slaves from being educated, but since Healy was determined to provide a future for his children, he sent them north for their educations, as did some other wealthy planters with mixed-race children. The Healy children were baptized and educated there, and gained opportunities as Irish Catholics.
Most of the sons first attended Quaker boarding schools in New York and New Jersey before transferring to a Catholic school in Massachusetts. All but the fifth son graduated from college. James, Patrick and Sherwood Healy all undertook graduate studies at the Saint-Sulpice Seminary in Paris, and the latter two earned doctorates there. The three daughters were educated at long-established Catholic convent schools in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
Of the nine children who lived to adulthood, three of the sons became ordained Catholic priests and educators, one died at 21, and all three daughters became nuns. (One of the daughters later left the order, married an Irish immigrant, and had a son.)
Since the late 20th century, especially, their achievements have been recognized as "firsts" for people of known African-American descent. James Augustine Healy became the first American bishop of African-American descent, Patrick Francis Healy was president of Georgetown College, and Eliza Healy attained the rank of Mother Superior in Vermont, one of the first African-American women to hold such a position.
Michael Healy had a 20-year career with the United States Revenue Cutter Service. Today he is noted 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 River North. It was developed in 1973 by Robert J. Adams Jr. and includes the Healy Point Country Club. A memorial stone honoring the Healy Family was placed in the subdivision and it still stands today.James O'Toole, "Passing Free: Black in the South, Irish in the North, the Healys Slipped the Bonds of Race in Civil War America" , Boston College Magazine, Summer 2003, accessed April 9, 2010
Under slave law and the principle of partus sequitur ventrem, adopted in Virginia in the 17th century, the children were legally slaves, as they were born to an enslaved mother. They were classified on the census as mulatto; the U.S. census until 1930 acknowledged mixed race. Their lives have intrigued historians, sociologists, and commentators because of the Healys' high achievements and their immigrant and ethnic complexity.
Members
James Augustine Healy
James Augustine Healy (1830–1900) graduated valedictorian of the Holy Cross's first graduating class in 1849. He became a priest in the Diocese of Boston. He was later consecrated as Bishop of Portland, Maine on June 2, 1875. At a period of rapid growth in Catholic immigration, Healy oversaw the establishment of 60 new churches, 68 missions, 18 convents and 18 schools in the diocese. Since the late 20th century, he has been considered the first American with African-American ancestry to serve as a Catholic bishop in the United States."James Augustine Healy", African American Registry Albert S. Foley wrote the first book-length biography of Healy, published in 1954, and also discussed his siblings.Foley, Albert S. Bishop Healy: Beloved Outcaste: The Story of a Great Priest Whose Life has Become a Legend (New York: Farrar, Straus and Young, 1954), available online
In 1962, Holy Cross christened its newest dormitory as Healy Hall in his honor, for his achievements in developing the Catholic diocese in Maine.
Patrick Francis Healy
Patrick Francis Healy (1834–1910) became a Jesuit. He was the first American with African ancestry to earn a PhD, completing it 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, now the first known African American to do so."Patrick Francis Healy", American Memory, Library of Congress, accessed February 7, 2011