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New Hibernia Review 7.3 (2003) 155-157



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Passing for White: Race, Religion, and the Healy Family, 1820-1920, by James M. O'Toole, pp. pp. 284. Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002. $34.95.

In Georgia in 1818, County Roscommon-born Michael Morris Healy acquired in a lottery some of the land that had recently been "ceded" by the local Indians and soon established a sizeable plantation there. He also obtained a "consort," Mary Eliza Smith, a light-skinned slave of uncertain origin but probably born on a neighboring property. Although the law regarded them as slaves, Healy treated the nine surviving children born to this union as his own, sending all of them to educational establishments in the North. Three of the Healys went on to become priests: one a bishop, another the "second founder" of Georgetown University, and two of their sisters became nuns. In some ways, this was a surprising choice, as Michael Healy himself seems to have fallen into the category of predevotional revolution Irish Catholics; he was never very exercised about matters of religion. Mary Eliza Healy died in 1849, Michael in 1850, just as he was about to abandon life in Georgia for residency in New York. His substantial property, which included sixty-one slaves, was sold and the money divided among his children.

The main elements of this intriguing tale were presented in the two volumes that Fr. Albert Foley published in 1954 and 1976, respectively, on the most famous members of the family, Bishop James A. Healy and Patrick F. Healy, S.J. There Foley explained the long gap between his two studies as due to his desire to see what reaction the first volume might bring in that race-conscious era. While most of the reviews had been positive, interpreting the bishop's story in particular as variously a sign of Roman Catholic tolerance, the working out of Divine Providence, or as a kind of existentialist demonstration of the "unconquerable spirit of born leaders," Foley was mindful that a portrait [End Page 155] of the Georgetown Healy was defaced sometime after the appearance of his first book, which he speculated may have been the work of outraged white students.

James M. O'Toole's new account, based on wider access to the materials, and appearing a less racially constrained time period—he notes that in the 1950s, a California descendant of the Healys dreaded the possibility that his wife might divorce him as a result of learning about his racial "taint"— offers much the same overall picture of the Healy family, but is a good deal more comprehensive than Foley's and adds several corrections to the received narrative. O'Toole's chapter on Captain Michael Augustine Healy of the U.S. Coast Guard is a gem in itself, deftly explaining what such work involved, as well as what Captain Healy had to fear from racial exposure.

But the Healys' story is certainly no uplifting freedom narrative. O'Toole cautions, for example, that there is no reason to think that the original Michael Healy, however loving his relationship with his "trusty woman" Eliza may have been, was ideologically opposed to slavery. Moreover, the journal that his eldest son James kept at Holy Cross College shows that even early on he too was no abolitionist: James refers to William Lloyd Garrison as a "fool" and uses derogatory terms for blacks. Intellectually and administratively gifted, as were his two priestly brothers, James was a shrewd manager of the family's considerable fortune derived from the sale of his father's property. Unable to return to Georgia himself where he was liable to be reduced to the condition of a chattel slave, he nevertheless took a careful business approach to the sale of the family's slaves, hiring them out to neighboring plantations for three years before finally putting them up for auction, and receiving unexpectedly good prices for them when the market improved.

O'Toole stresses that all the members of the family saw themselves as white and that...

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