| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

James M. O'Toole. Passing For White: Race, Religion, and the Healy Family, 1820–1920. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. 2002. Pp. xii, 284. $34.95.
James M. O'Toole has written a fascinating account of one family who defied overwhelming odds to become educated and respected members of society. Well researched and engagingly written, his book tells the story of the nine Healy children, who achieved considerable success in the Roman Catholic Church and the military in nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century America. Born in antebellum Georgia to a slave mother and a white, slave-owning father, three brothers entered religious life: one became a bishop in Maine, another the rector of the cathedral in Boston, and a third the president of Georgetown University. Of the two sisters who entered religious life, one became a major superior of her order. A younger brother achieved success as a captain in the U.S. Coast Guard. O'Toole believes it was the powerful connection with the Catholic Church that paved the way for these mixed race children to "pass" as members of white society.	1
Michael Healy was an Irish immigrant who owned land and slaves in Georgia in the early nineteenth century. Around 1829 he began "living together" with Eliza Clark, one of his slaves, and over the next two decades they had ten children together. One died in infancy. Based on Georgia law, the children were slaves because their mother was a slave. To avoid this stigma, Healy sent the children north to be educated and raised by whites, including the Catholic bishop of Boston, John Bernard Fitzpatrick, whom Healy met on one of his business trips. By 1850, five children were safely out of Georgia when both parents unexpectedly died. An older brother, Hugh, returned surreptitiously to Georgia to bring his younger siblings north.	. . .

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