From Slavery to Freedom to Public Service: The Healy Family
By Hank Nuwer
First published in Cordova Times
Irish immigrant Michael Morris Healy and his lifelong companion Mary Eliza Clark Smith found solace in their Catholic religion and took joy in the unmatchable accomplishments of their brood of children.
Now this being the Deep South in the first half of the nineteenth century, Healy ran a plantation with up to 80 Negro slave laborers. It was a 1,500 acre cotton plantation with grist mill located in Jones County, Georgia, on the Ocmulgee River.
“Mike” prided himself in having the best of everything. His horses and mules were thoroughbreds.
He owned a modern threshing machine to separate grain from chaff, a straw cutter, and wagons pulled by three yoke oxen.
Mostly his farming reputation came from the hogs in his pen. A contributor to the Macon Weekly Telegraph noted that all of Healy’s prize hogs were shipped from Long Island, New York. Many weighed more than 400-pounds at just 12-months. Healy gave colorful names to his stock, including “Mickey Free,” “Biddy McCann,” and “Sam Weller.”
Healy and his octoroon wife Eliza were exceptionally wealthy, or at least he was, for Eliza was black and could own no property. And for all the love Healy felt for Eliza, he never married her.
Under Deep South law, despite his stature in the Macon community, he could face arrest, and she could be taken from him and sold.
Yet there was one law Healy never could abide. Although it was unlawful to school slaves, he took great risks to send at least eight of his ten children to fine Quaker and Catholic schools like the College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts where most earned top awards.
Some of the offspring like Mike Healy Jr. had the features of their Caucasian father and were said to keep secret their Negro blood from bigots of the day. Others like Sherwood Healy clearly inherited Eliza’s hair, skin and features.
Although Mike Jr. was a troubled youth and escaped from his school, tying a rope around a statue and lifting himself out a window, he later carved out an impressive career as a seaman.
In time “Hell Roaring Mike” became a commander of a ship named the Bear and was the very symbol of law and order in the Arctic. The first of Negro blood to command a U.S. federal vessel, he represented the federal government to prosecute illegal whalers, smugglers, and other nogoodniks.
Although rough as a cob, he loved to read and kept a small library in his quarters. He was known to the native peoples of nearly every small coastal village in Alaska.
His was a great career with the U.S. Marine Revenue Service until the bottle got the best of him, and a suspension tarnished his reputation.
Other children of Mike Sr. and Eliza led less flamboyant but nonetheless remarkable lives.
Here are the names of those I could track through Newspapers.com searches.
James Augustine Healy in 1875 became the bishop of the Diocese of Portland, Maine, and served for 25 years until heart failure ended his brilliant career in 1900.
Amanda Josephine Healy served as a nun in Montreal with the Religious Hospitallers of St. Joseph.
Eliza Healy became a member of the Notre Dame Congregation in Montreal and was named Mother Superior.
Martha Mary Healy became a nun as well but left the convent. She married salesman Jeremiah Cashman became a well-known parishioner in Massachusetts, according to the family’s historian James M. O’Toole.
Patrick Francis Healy won acclaim as the first African American to earn a doctoral degree in philosophy. Later he served a long career as the president of Georgetown University.
Reverend Alexander Sherwood Healy was the pastor of Saint James Catholic Church. He was ordained in 1858 at the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris.
Eugene A. Healy married and worked as a salesman for the R. H. White Company.
Sadly, Michael Sr. and Eliza Healy each fell into declining health in 1850 and put up their plantation for sale.
It would have pleased the romantic in me to hear that Mike Sr. freed all of slaves before the couple died in 1850.
But such was not the case. Eighty Negro men, women and children were put up for sale, unjustly regarded as so much property.
When the couple died, the Civil War still was a decade away. President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863, declared all Negro slaves in the Confederate South to be free.
Hank Nuwer is an adjunct professor with the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. He is again writing his column after successfully recovering from knee replacement surgery.