 | John Dillard Bellamy Jr. was born on March 24, 1854, the 6th child of John and Eliza Bellamy, in the former residence of Governor Benjamin Smith, corner of 2nd and Dock Streets. In his Memoirs of an Octogenarian, he speaks proudly of his distinction as the 7th generation to be named "John Bellamy." He started school at age six and remembers going to the stocks during recess to watch the criminals being whipped, and also to the old Slave Market in Wilmington at Front and Market Streets where "slaves were sold like livestock." He remembers, too, the Yellow Fever epidemic in 1862 and watching from his home on Market Street wagonloads of corpses go by to Oakdale Cemetery. |
John was in his 11th year when Fort Fisher fell and President Lincoln was assassinated. He says his father had already toughened him for war by making him and his younger brother George go barefoot during the winters so that when time came for them to go to Virginia, they would be able to stand the exposure of the battle fields.Voted Best Orator in high school and rising to the rank of Captain at Cape Fear Academy, John Jr. then entered Davidson College as a sophomore in 1871 where his mother was "hoping and expecting she would make a Presbyterian clergyman out of me."Despite his mother's disappointment, John decided to study law at the University of Virginia. He says nearly all of the universities of the Southern states were closed at that time. "Even my sisters had to economize and wear one less dress in order to save money [for my education.]" John was graduated at Charlottesville in 1874, receiving diplomas in the Schools of German, Medical Jurisprudence, History and Literature, and Junior Law, and a year later his Bachelor of Law degree. That summer, he became a friend and tutor to "Tommy" Woodrow Wilson -- future President of Princeton University, Governor of New Jersey, and 28th President of the United States.
| During his career as a distinguished lawyer, businessman and politician, John served as the attorney for the City of Wilmington, the attorney for Brunswick County, president of the New Hanover Bar Association, and North Carolina State Senator from 1891-1892.In the late 1890s, Wilmington entered a turbulent political era during which Democrats, including John Jr., strategized to regain power from the city's Republican and black officeholders. In the election of 1898, John won his Congressional race and Democrats forcefully installed a new city government in what is often noted today as the only coup d'etat in US history. In 1990, Congressman Bellamy canvassed the state advocating a constitutional amendment known as the Grandfather Clause that effectively disenfranchised black voters. |  John Jr. described himself in his memoirs as an "ultra Democrat" and "Bourbon Southern Democrat," as well as a "Calvinistic Presbyterian." Photo courtesy of HSLCP. |
The home of John, his wife Emma and their five children, circa 1901; photo courtesy of NHCPL. The house burned in 1972, the same year as the fire that was set in the Bellamy Mansion just a block away.
Believing that life in Wilmington had been returned to "a reign of justice and peace," John and his wife Emma M. Hargrove, daughter of Colonel John Hargrove, of Granville County, NC, with their children Eliza, William, Emmett, Mary and Marguerite, acquired (and upgraded to an exuberant Queen Ann style) their home on 6th and Market Streets, within a few doors of his mother, sisters and brother Robert.
