War and Politics: A House Divided

FAMILY BEFORE THE WAR

To paraphrase Prussian general Carl von Clausewitz: War is a mere continuation of politics by other means. In the context of the Bellamy family and those constructing the home site in Wilmington between 1859 and 1861, the onrushing war and its politics were closely entwined. Some of the architects and builders constructing the Bellamy house saw the social and political issues quite differently from the family. The radical differences of opinion of these many men, expressed sometimes in writing and often in actions, were indicative of the fissures across American society.

Dr. John D. Bellamy (1817-1896)

As an ardent 1860s states' right proponent, a slave owner, and an admirer of pro-enslavement politician and former Vice President John C. Calhoun, Dr. John D. Bellamy fully supported secession from the Union. When South Carolina seceded first in December 1860, he was dismayed that many prominent Wilmington families "would not take part in the celebration," according to the memoirs of one of his sons, John Jr. Three days before Christmas that year, Bellamy Sr. bought many empty flammable tar barrels and had them placed along Front Street to light a celebratory night time procession. He procured musicians and headed the marching column himself at Front and Market Streets. In the ensuing months, as other states followed South Carolina out of the Union, North Carolina held back for political and economic reasons, officially seceding on May 20, 1861.

1862 5c Confederate stamp featuring Jefferson Davis.

According to John Bellamy Jr. in his 1940s memoir, on May 29, 1861, when Jefferson Davis visited Wilmington en route to Richmond to take on his role as President of the Confederate States of America, Dr. Bellamy was head of the welcoming party. ​At a large reception at the railroad depot, he introduced his seven year old son, John Jr., to Davis. Davis put his hand on the boy's head and observed that he would "live to be a good man and make a valiant soldier."

​Marsden Bellamy, the eldest of the Bellamy sons, enlisted in the Scotland Neck Cavalry volunteers before the official secession, and later enlisted in the Confederate Navy. Just a few months later, his younger brother William Bellamy joined the Wilmington Rifle Guards, while Dr. Bellamy himself served in the home guard.

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THE BUILDERS

Meanwhile, Connecticut native Rufus Bunnell, the assistant architect for the Bellamy house project, kept a journal during his stay in Wilmington. From May 1859 to August 1860 he wrote his social and political observations of the South, noting that the summer weather was oppressively hot: "Everything droops." Meanwhile, politics "on the slavery question was fast growing hotter than the weather." His distaste for the treatment of Blacks within slavery and acts such as public floggings, was clear. As political tensions increased, the increasingly anti-slavery Bunnell returned home and served in a Connecticut regiment of the Union army.

Rufus Bunnell (1835-1909)

Working alongside Bunnell was the New Jersey born lead architect, James F. Post. He had been established in Wilmington since 1849 and was a prolific designer of houses and the 1858 City Hall-Thalian Hall. He used enslaved workers on his projects and participated in slave patrols in the city. At the outbreak of war, he joined the Confederate artillery and later helped build fortifications, barracks and officers' quarters at Fort Anderson and Fort Fisher along the Cape Fear River.

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Henry Taylor (1823-1891). His son Robert was the first Black graduate of MIT in architecture.

Robert designed Tuskegee University with Booker T. Washington. He was honored with a US postage stamp, unveiled in 2015 by Henry's great-great granddaughter and senior White House aide in the Obama administration, Valerie Jarrett.

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.

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POLITICIANS IN WARTIME

Union General William T. Sherman

When a yellow fever outbreak ravaged Wilmington in the summer of 1862, the Bellamy family took refuge at Floral College, a Presbyterian girls' school in North Carolina near the depot village of Shoe Heel (now Maxton). They remained there for the duration of the war. In early 1865, a regiment of Union General William Tecumseh Sherman's forces marched through Floral College, marauding and foraging, ransacking the Bellamy family's residence, taking their food and many personal possessions.

Union General Joseph Hawley

After the fall of Wilmington in early 1865, the Bellamy house was taken over as headquarters for Union military staff, first by General John M. Schofield, and then on March 1, reassigned to Union Brigadier General Joseph Hawley. In February and August of 1865, General Sherman visited his commanders there. Another distinguished abolitionist visitor was Salmon P. Chase, chief justice of the US Supreme Court (from 1864 to 1873).

Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase

President Andrew Johnson

Thomas Woodrow Wilson, circa 1870s

President Wilson

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.

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POST-WAR FAMILY

John D. Bellamy Jr. (1854-1942)

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.

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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.