Eliza M. H. Bellamy, Antebellum Privilege and Power

Just 18 in 1839 and newly married to John Dillard Bellamy, Eliza McIlhenny Harriss Bellamy would have been well-trained in the role of a woman in the antebellum South. According to NC historian Alice Eley Jones, she was likely, "gracious, fragile and deferential to the men upon whose protection she depended; imbued with the proper manners and literacy required of a young lady in her station, as well as the necessary basic household skills like sewing, supervising the garden and putting up preserves.”

Born in 1821 and growing up in Wilmington as the first of eight children to Mary Priscilla Jennings Harriss and her husband Dr. William James Harriss, Eliza has been described as a "rather plain girl but blessed with a bright inquiring mind, serious nature, and sweet disposition," wrote local historian Diane Cobb Cashman in her 1989 report on the "History of the Bellamy Mansion."

​After "dame school," primarily operated by women in their homes offering basic literacy instruction and skills like sewing and embroidery for young girls, Eliza went on to be schooled at Pittsboro Academy in Chatham County, NC, a favorite summer residence of many of Wilmington's old families.

She continued her education in New Haven, CT, traveling back and forth on a small sailing vessel, an adventure in itself. While at New Haven, she developed a serious interest in botany.​

Perhaps it was a mutual interest in science, per Cashman, that first kindled the romance which developed between Eliza and her father's young medical student, John Dillard Bellamy.

Eliza and John were married by the local Presbyterian minister on June 12, 1839, at the Harriss home on Dock Street. Sadly, Eliza's father died just a month later at age 42. The newlyweds' plans to take a honeymoon abroad and then move to Philadelphia, where Dr. Bellamy intended to start his practice, were set aside so that Eliza could care for her grieving mother and siblings. John took over Dr. Harriss's practice and he and Eliza moved into the Harriss residence on Dock Street. That household included Eliza's mother and seven younger brothers and sisters - all under the age of 15 - as well as fourteen enslaved workers. It was in that home where the first Bellamy children were born: Mary Elizabeth (Belle), Marsden, William (Willie) and Eliza (Liza).

One can only imagine both the excitement and trepidation Eliza may have felt during her ocean voyages to New Haven aboard a small sailing ship. She may have traveled on a packet schooner or brig, which was a regularly scheduled shipping line carrying mail, cargo and passengers coastwise and across the Atlantic.

​In 1846, the Bellamy family moved across the street and five more children were born. Ellen (1852), John Jr. (1854), George (1856), Kate, who died in infancy, (1858) and Chesley in 1859. By 1860, the Bellamy household included Eliza and John and their eight children, aged one to 19, as well as nine enslaved domestic workers. Eliza, as you would expect, would have assumed the mantle of mistress of the house.   ​

​We have only a few glimpses of Eliza's actual personality from letters and memoirs, but we do know that she lived a grand lifestyle as the wife of one of Wilmington's richest men. Only during the Civil War was their affluence interrupted for a time.​

As an enslaver, Eliza entrusted her children to a "nurse," delegating the most tiresome and routine tasks to her. That may well have included breastfeeding Eliza's babies. In her late 1930s memoir of childhood (Back with the Tide), Eliza's daughter Ellen identified an enslaved woman named Joan as serving as a nurse. Ellen also references "Aunt Betsy Kedar," who accompanied John and Eliza, their daughter Mary Elizabeth and baby Chesley, on their trip to New York City in 1860 to select new furnishings for their Market Street home. Aunt Betsy was "an old freed mulatto woman," as Ellen put it, her father "thinking it unwise to take our regular slave nurse [Joan] as the country was so excited just then on the slavery question."

The Bellamy family's new home (shown here as a rendering by assistant architect Rufus Bunnell), completed in 1861, was located near the edge of town, "considered to be about the boundary," according to Ellen in her memoirs. Only a few blocks away, and indicative of the brutalities for much of the population at the time, there was once a hanging yard called Gallows HillI where Eliza as a child was sent with her enslaved nurse to witness "a negro woman hanged there." It was not uncommon for the local newspaper to post the dates and times of executions, and for huge crowds,  including children, to watch them.

Interestingly, this was a memory Eliza shared with her family. Ellen wrote: "The Gallows Hill was where the Old Ladies’ Home now is, corner 9th and Princess [there was more than one Gallows Hill over time]; when the sheriff asked what crimes the woman had committed, replied; "'Nothing but killing old Mrs. Bradley' (her mistress). But as the town began to build up, the gallows was moved down to South Front Street, Dry Pond.” ​​

Happier memories of wealth and travel included the Bellamy family spending May and June at their Grovely Plantation in Brunswick County and moving on to higher ground at Salem, Red Springs and Laurinburg. They caught the salt breeze at Smithville (now Southport) or the Sound for the duration of the summer, according to Cashman. School began traditionally in October so the family was then in residence in Wilmington; however, the family traveled to visit family and friends, go to fairs, school exhibitions, and weddings.

Central to society was the church. Eliza -- and later her children -- remained staunch Presbyterians, while John, a strict temperance advocate, maintained his devotion to the Methodist faith.

An outbreak of Yellow Fever in 1862 forced many Wilmington families to take refuge in a safer place. Eliza oversaw the gathering of their enslaved population and the packing up of their possessions into wagons headed for Floral College. This was a Presbyterian girls' school near the depot village of Shoe Heel (now Maxton) where the Bellamys remained until the end of the war. ​Although the Civil War (1861-1865) took its toll on the Bellamy family, like so many others, Eliza persevered and raised six boys and three girls. She saw two sons, Marsden and Willie, go and thankfully return from the battlefields. This period, away from the wealth and privilege of their former life, is described by daughter Ellen as one of relative privation. It was, however, only a brief change of circumstance.​

With the fall of Fort Fisher in early 1865, Union troops advanced toward Wilmington. Officers requisitioned some of the largest and finest homes, especially those whose owners had left town, including the Bellamys. From February through the summer, the Bellamy house served as headquarters for Union military staff. In the meantime, homes and properties owned by Confederate "rebels" were confiscated until they took an oath of allegiance to the United States. 

For Dr. Bellamy, given his wealth and status as a "person of known disloyalty," gaining a pardon and regaining his properties were in the hands of General Joseph Hawley, who, together with his wife Harriet, and fellow officers occupied the Bellamy house until he was reassigned in June 1865.

While there, the Hawley's received a visit from Eliza Bellamy hoping to reclaim her home. There are two versions of how that meeting unfolded. One was described by daughter Ellen in her memoirs and the other as recollected by Mrs. Hawley. Per Ellen: Mother found it "most humiliating, and trying, to be entertained by Mrs. Hawley, in her own parlor.... During the call, she offered Mother some figs (from Mother's own tree) which Aunt Sarah had picked -- our old cook, who had been left in charge of the premises" -- and presumably had offered her services to the new occupants. Eliza Bellamy played her role with panache, sharing the stance of many southern women who held up their gentility as flags unbowed by defeat.

Per Harriet Hawley: "The lady [Eliza Bellamy] made herself as agreeable as possible, spoke of the General's occupancy and her own absence, much as people who had gone off to the sea-shore for the summer might speak of renting their town house till their return; intimating that she wouldn't hurry the General commanding for the world, and hoped that he would remain with his family until it was entirely convenient to remove, but suggested that she and her husband thought they would probably return in a couple or three months, when, of course, they supposed their house would be ready for them! Confiscation seemed to have no terrors for her; or, if it had, they were dexterously concealed under and air of smiling and absolute assurance."
 
Dr. Bellamy finally received a pardon to regain possession of his home in September 1865. In a letter to her daughter Belle, Eliza wrote: "I never saw so much dirt in my life" and the basement, site of the kitchen and dining room, was "more like a hogpen than anything else." After refurbishing the house, Eliza turned her attention to the garden, where she put to use her longstanding interest in horticulture. 

Having lost one baby (Kate) in 1858, Eliza gave birth to Chesley the following year. Sadly, Chesley succumbed to an unknown illness in 1881 at age 22. Based on the symptoms described in his obituary, it is believed he died from viral encephalitis contracted from contaminated water. Eliza's husband died in 1896 age 79, while her first child, Belle, died at age 59 in 1900.

​Alongside these difficult and tragic experiences, Eliza was well-loved and cared for by her husband and family and mostly enjoyed a life of privilege. Daughter Ellen wrote in her memoirs: While at Grovely, "the fruit was in its glory and I would follow my father in the orchard culling the most choice which he always deposited in front of mother. He wanted the very best for her; he was always the most devoted husband and his love and attention never failed to the very end, although married 57 years.”

“In civil and political affairs, American women take no interest or concern, except so far as they sympathize with their family and personal friends….”

Catherine Beecher
"A Treatise on Domestic Economy
for the Use of Young Ladies at Home, and at School" (1845)

During the 1898 white supremacy campaign across the state of North Carolina, which led to the rigged election of Eliza's son John Bellamy Jr. to the U.S. Congress, the takeover of Wilmington's duly elected biracial city government (the only coup d'etat in American history), and the massacre of an untold number of Black citizens, one can only wonder what Mrs. Bellamy and her two unmarried daughters (Liza and Ellen) were witnessing from their windows. 

According to Bill Reaves’ Strength Through Struggle: 
The Chronological & Historical Record of the African-American Community in Wilmington, North Carolina, 1865-1950, available online: ​

"By this time, the town was tense with a riotous atmosphere. A deadly quiet had spread over the city. Both blacks and whites remained at home behind closed doors or left town. Businesses and schools were closed. Churches provided shelter for many frightened blacks, while others fled into the woods and swamps surrounding the city.

​Martial law was proclaimed and military units were sent from cities around the state. Two hundred local white policemen were sworn in to keep the peace. The Mayor and Board of Aldermen were summoned to City Hall, where they were forced to resign. They were replaced by an all-white board of Democrats. The chief of police and the entire police department was forced to resign. Several prominent black and white Republicans were rounded up and forced to spend the night in jail. The next day, they were escorted to the railroad depot and made to board northbound trains. During the ensuing weeks all government jobs held by blacks, from fireman to City Hall janitor, were vacated and given to white employees."

Following these violent events, John Jr. took his seat in Congress. In 1900 a North Carolina constitutional amendment creating a literacy test was passed. It was part a series of so-called Black Codes that disenfranchised Black voters and ended an era of Black political participation. Like most others among Wilmington's social and economic White leadership, members of the Bellamy family believed that life had been returned to "a reign of justice and peace," as daughter Ellen put it, at last.  

Only a few years later, in ​October 1907, the Wilmington Messenger reported the death of Mrs. Eliza Bellamy, age 87, "the oldest living white resident of Wilmington."