Articles of clothing such as pants, hats, frocks, handkerchiefs, ribbons, socks, cravats, and hand-me-downs were given. Also, tobacco, beads, toys, candy, blankets, pocket knives, pipes, and sometimes money.​

​Some enslavers gave their enslaved workers a feast. According to different slave accounts, the enslaver provided the food, or they allowed the enslaved to go hunting. Occasionally enslavers provided liquor, and some foods and drinks they gave at Christmas included:

• Roasted oxen, pigs, turkey, sheep and wild game like raccoons, rabbits, and possums
• Whiskey, eggnog, brandy, cider, wine, or beer
• Some even received desserts like peach cobbler or apple dumplings

Enslaved people might have dances that lasted for most of the night and were incorporated with the feasts that enslavers allowed. Watching these festivities was a form of entertainment for the slave-holding families themselves. ​

In North Carolina, some enslaved people had a holiday traditional celebration called Jonkonnu. The celebration has roots that go back to the Caribbean and West Africa. Wilmington and New Bern were the main places in which the celebrations occurred, but similar versions of Jonkonnu could be found in coastal South Carolina and Georgia dating to the 1700s.

​During this celebration enslaved men and women would dress up in colorful outfits and parade around performing music for their enslavers “demanding” gifts. The enslavers’ families then participated by giving out small gifts.

Often enslaved individuals had relatives enslaved by other families on neighboring plantations or in nearby towns. In order for slaves to travel to visit family, the enslavers distributed passes. During the holiday season, enslavers issued these passes more often than during other times of the year.
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Why did enslavers give these gifts of goods, time off, and even visits with family members? One major reason was to try and prevent enslaved individuals from revolting or running away. The holiday season meant “hiring out” of slaves for contracted work was nearing. Enslavers negotiated these contracts on or near January 1st each year and a contract could be for many months or even a full year. Individuals and businesses contracted enslaved men, women, and children to engage in often backbreaking and dangerous work. For example, the railroad company "hired out" many men and even offered insurance policies to enslavers in case of injury or death to the workers. It's possible the stress of this impending change was deliberately defrayed by the slight loosening of the usual order within slavery during the holiday season.

Henry Taylor's perspective was as an enslaved carpenter working on construction of the Bellamy site. He was described by Booker T. Washington in The Story of the Negro as, "the son of a white man who was at the same time his master. Although he was nominally enslaved, he was early given liberty to do about as he pleased." Taylor was a successful carpenter–builder before the Civil War. After emancipation, he continued carpentry and ran a grocery store. His later projects included Wilmington's original Hemenway School (c. 1868) and Giblem Masonic Lodge (c. 1871), the first lodge for Blacks in the city and second oldest in the state. He was also a founding member of the Chestnut Street Presbyterian Church and active in local politics, including as a member of the Executive Board of the Colored Union League.

After the Civil War, the Colored Union League mobilized newly enfranchised Black voters, working primarily to ensure they remained loyal to the Republican party, providing them with opportunities to debate political and societal issues, negotiate labor contracts, and plan how to care for the sick among them. The Ku Klux Klan’s increasingly successful violent intimidation efforts against White and Black Union Leaguers revealed a deep fear of Republican dominance and perceived Black domination. 

Taylor's son, Robert, was the first Black graduate from MIT, in architecture, and he was featured on a 2015 US postage stamp for his pioneering role. His great-great granddaughter is Valerie Jarrett, who served as Senior Advisor to President Barack Obama, and her daughter Laura Jarrett was a CNN correspondent and now is a contributing legal journalist on NBC.

In the immediate postwar years, other builders of the Bellamy site became prominent in civic life, including the Howe and Sadgwar families. Perhaps most prominent in local politics was George W. Price Jr., who had daringly escaped by boat on the Cape Fear River in 1862 alongside enslaved plasterer William B. Gould and six others. The men were picked up by a Union ship and joined the Union Navy. On his return to his native city as a veteran, Price promptly became a leading Republican figure. He was elected to the city board of aldermen in 1868, served in the state legislature from 1869 through 1872, and became city marshal and justice of the peace in 1874 and for several years thereafter.

Union veteran Gould headed north after the war and settled in Dedham, Massachusetts, with his wife Cornelia, also formerly enslaved in Wilmington. Their great-great-grandson William B. Gould IV is an emeritus Stanford University law professor and served as chair of the National Labor Relations Board under President Bill Clinton.

After the occupation of Wilmington in February 1865, the Federal government seized all of Dr. Bellamy's property, including his highly profitable naval stores operations in Columbus County,  Grovely Plantation in Brunswick County, his stores and buildings in Wilmington, and the residence on Market and 5th. Bellamy enslaved 115 people, many on these plantation businesses. We unfortunately do not know much of what happened in the lives of these populations. Throughout the summer of 1865, Bellamy worked to gain the necessary pardon and to reclaim his business properties and home. He finally received a presidential pardon, signed by President Andrew Johnson. Johnson himself was the last President to own enslaved people and is noted for allowing white supremacy to regain power in the post-war South.

In the summer of 1874, as Reconstruction faltered, son John Bellamy Jr. returned home after graduating from the University of Virginia law school. The new minister of First Presbyterian Church, which the Bellamy family attended, was Joseph Ruggles Wilson, the father of Thomas Woodrow Wilson. John Jr. became a friend and tutor to young Wilson, then of college age. The two young men shared an interest in books and history, and Tommy (as he was fondly called) spent many hours at the Bellamy home before leaving Wilmington to study at Princeton. Woodrow Wilson later served as president of Princeton University and as the governor of New Jersey before winning the 1912 presidential election. From 1913 to 1921, he was the 28th President of the United States. His domestic policies as President were notably segregationist and his expressed opinions marked him an apologist for slavery and a supporter of the lost cause myth.

Illustrative of how Civil War politics lingered well past Reconstruction is the career of ​John D. Bellamy Jr. He became a prominent Wilmington attorney and served as a State Senator before running for US Congress during the White supremacy campaign of 1898. In 1898 a statewide effort by Democrats to regain elected positions from Black politicians used voter intimidation, propaganda, voter suppression, and fear mongering to win elections "by whatever means." John Jr. did win the election, but it was so clearly fraudulent that the man he beat, Oliver Dockery, contested the election results. He sought witnesses and evidence for a case that sought a Congressional hearing into the election and the murders that took place in Wilmington two days later.

The Wilmington Massacre -- where an unknown number of Black citizens were killed and run out of town by White assailants -- was part of the only successful coup d'etat in American history. It removed a multi-racial 'fusionist' city government, erased the burgeoning African American middle-class, and instituted a white supremacist government by force. Events in Wilmington led to a sea-change across the state and was a facet of the replacement of Reconstruction with Jim Crow. John Jr. claimed in his diary not to be in town during the massacre but it is highly likely he aided in the planning leading up to the events. John Jr. had already served as a Democrat in the North Carolina Senate (1891-1892) and joined the US House of Representatives from 1899-1903. He was a delegate to the National Democratic Convention in 1892, 1908, and 1920. He also served as a delegate to the Washington Disarmament Conference in 1924 and 1932. In 1936, he was selected to cast the electoral vote of North Carolina for Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Of Dr. Bellamy's six sons, the only other politician was George Bellamy. He was also a farmer and ran Grovely Plantation in Brunswick County for his father after it became a post-war sharecropping enterprise. George was active in the county's politics earning him the nickname the "Duke of Brunswick." According to his brother John Jr., George "served many times as legislator in the Lower House and also in the Senate, until he was appointed US Marshal for the Eastern District of North Carolina."

These sketches of some of the figures related to the history of the museum site come from The Bellamy Mansion Mansion: Wilmington, North Carolina by Catherine Bishir (2004), Memoirs of an Octogenarian by John Bellamy, Jr. (1942), Back with the Tide, Memoirs of Ellen Douglas Bellamy (2002) and excerpts of the diaries of Rufus Bunnell. As a point of interpretation it is important to recall that memoirs inherently reflect the biases of their authors and are not objective.