James Augustine Healy

Healy's enduring significance in Africanthe Statesn history is that he showed how a somebody of ability could, with luck, transcend the barriers of race to play a major role in society.

James Augustine Healy was born on April 6, 1830, on a orchard in Jones County, Georgia. His father was Michael Morris Healy, an Irishman who came to North America with the British Army during the War of 1812, settled in Nova Scotia, and move to Georgia in 1818 (Foley, 1969: 4. Origin altogethery regarded with hostility by his neighbors because he was Irish and Catholic, Michael Healy thrived and became a successful planter. By 1831, he possess sixteen hundred acres of land and seventeen break one's backs; by 1833, his land holdings had doubled.

In 1829, Healy entered into married life with a hard worker woman, Mary Eliza Smith, who had been born on a neighboring woodlet in 1813. Later, many legends arose about her background, some holding that her stemma traced back to refugees from a lateeighteenthcentury slave revolt on the Caribbean island of Santo Domingo (Foley, 1969: 7). In fact, her background was not so exotic, but it is worth noting that she was related to Ellen Smith Craft, wife of abolitionist William Craft (Logan and Winston, 1982: 302).

Racial mixing, "miscegenation," was extremely widespread in the plantation southwestward, and it was a very severe s

(Foley, 1969: 145)

murmurings were not lost on Father Healy ... Father

ocial "problem" in a slave society (Bennett, 1969: 242ff). White plantation women in particular were frequently outraged when their husbands took up with attractive slave women. However, the relationship between Michael Healy and "his trusty woman Eliza" (Bennett, 1969: 253) had all the characteristics of a marriage, though it may originally sustain been an unconsecrated and summary "common law" relationship. Marriage between a clean man and a black slave woman was technically illegal under Georgia law (Foley, 1969: 7). Every reading material we have, however, is that Michael Healy regarded Eliza as his wife.

He kept a daguerro suit (an early type of photograph) of her, but it probably has not survived; in any case, no reproduction of it is available.

this with an iron determination to bend their

This was a nasty period for Irish Catholics in Boston. In 1854, the fiercely antiCatholic "Know Nothing" party  the ancestor of all later racist parties and dejections  gained almost complete control of the mommy Legislature, and took various legal and quasilegal measures to harass and squeeze Irish Catholics. The experienced of an oppressed people must have been a familiar one to Healy. He also proven himself an effective pastor to an oftenintractable congregation. From Bishop John Fitzpatrick he

In the decades before the Civil War, as the abolitionist movement gathered strength and force, proslavery elements throughout the South became increasingly paranoid. They were all too well aware that their " personal manner of life" belonged to the past, not the future. Thus, slave codes in Georgia and early(a) slave states became increasingly harsh, to the point where even the "rights" of slaveowners were sharp infringed upon. Owners could not free their own slaves; manumission could be done only if by an Act of the state legislature,
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