Healy Family - Education

Education

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.

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, 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. 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.