John Dillard Bellamy

John Dillard Bellamy Jr. (March 24, 1854 – September 25, 1942) was a Democratic U.S. Congressman from North Carolina between 1899 and 1903.

Born in Wilmington, North Carolina into one of the area's wealthiest families, Bellamy was a close friend of future President Woodrow Wilson as a young man.[1] Bellamy attended local common schools, the Cape Fear Military Academy, Davidson College, graduating in 1873, and finally the University of Virginia at Charlottesville, graduating in 1875. He was admitted to the bar in 1875 and practiced law in Wilmington, where he was city attorney from 1892 to 1894.

He was elected to the North Carolina Senate in 1900, amid the widespread voter fraud and intimidation tactics of the Wilmington Insurrection of 1898. Wilmington lawyer William Henderson was one of many targeted in the insurrection and wrote of Bellamy: "[He] walks cheerfully to his seat over broken homes, broken hearts, disappointed lives, dead husbands and fathers, the trampled rights of freedmen and not one word of condemnation is heard."[2]

Bellamy served one term before being elected as a Democrat to the 56th United States Congress; he was re-elected once more, serving until 1903, and was unsuccessful in gaining a third term. Bellamy was also a delegate to the 1892, 1908, and 1920 Democratic National Conventions.

After leaving Congress, he returned to his law practice in Wilmington. Among his clients were the Seaboard Air Line Railway, the Southern Bell Telephone Co., and the Western Union Telegraph Co. In 1932, Governor Angus McLean appointed him a commissioner from North Carolina to the celebration of the two-hundredth anniversary of the birth of George Washington. Bellamy died in Wilmington in 1942.

Bellamy published Memoirs of an Octogenarian in 1942; this self-published memoir has become a valuable primary source for historians studying late nineteenth-century North Carolina history, politics, and law, and in particular the Wilmington Insurrection of 1898.