They Stole a City

Prologue: Wilmington, North Carolina, springtime, 1993

Overview

Cynthia Brown left Wilmington, North Carolina, and stayed away for years. She didn't know the full story of her own family or why so much of her community's history had been erased. This is about what it took to find both.

In spring 1993, Cynthia Brown returned to Wilmington as the city's first director of human resources. Her former fifth-grade teacher invited her to lunch at a stranger's house. There, a distant cousin handed her a memoir called "A History of the Howe Family," written by Nada McDonald Cotton.

The booklet traced her family line through her father James Brown, her grandmother Louise Brown McCoy, and her great-grandmother Athalia Howe Whitfield, all the way back to William C. Howe. William was the illegitimate son of Alfred "Fred" Howe. Fred and his brothers Pompey and Anthony built much of Wilmington's Black economic life. Their father, Anthony Walker Howe, had been kidnapped from present-day Nigeria and sold into slavery.

The memoir also told the story of November 10, 1898, when white supremacists killed Black citizens and took over the city government. Athalia lived through it. Afterward, she cooked for Walter Parsley, one of the men who had planned the attack. Near the end of her life, she told the young Brown to run if it ever happened again. Wilmington's Black population dropped from 56 percent in 1898 to 34 percent by 1990.

The memoir reached Cynthia Brown through a family connection. It shows how one family's private history is bound up with a city's public violence. Before 1898, Wilmington had a thriving Black economic elite. They were descendants of an ancestor kidnapped from Africa into slavery, and they built their success under a system designed to keep Black people down. The events of November 1898 were a coup and a massacre, not a spontaneous race riot. White supremacist forces murdered Black residents and installed themselves in power. After 1898, the city's Black community was transformed, and that transformation lasted. Athalia's dying warning carried that history forward as a threat that could happen again.

Chapter 1: The Howes Arise

Overview

Anthony was an Igbo boy taken from Calabar. In the 1770s, he repaired his storm-damaged cabin at Howe's Point. Robert Howe moved him from field work to fixing barns, storehouses, and the big house, then hired him out to others. Anthony wanted to marry Tenah, a Tuscarora child who had been separated from her parents after a raid. He asked to buy her as his wife. The Howes refused until a scandal involving a nephew forced them to agree. Anthony and Tenah had seven children, five of whom survived. Family stories say Robert Howe meant to free Anthony, but records show the family remained enslaved, possibly with some practical freedom, until legal freedom came in the mid-nineteenth century.

Wilmington

By 1820, Anthony was a carpenter in Wilmington. It was a port town with a thriving free Black community in the building trades. In 1835, E. C. Bettencourt, a relative of Anthony's former enslavers, gave him a half-acre lot on Queen Street between Third and Fourth. It was his for life, then it passed to his descendants.

David Walker

David Walker was born in Wilmington around 1785. His mother was free and his father was enslaved. In 1829, he published An Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World. He sent bundles to Wilmington. Authorities there seized 200 pamphlets. In Savannah, they seized 60. The pamphlet led to laws banning seditious literature. Georgia offered a ten-thousand-dollar bounty. Walker died ten months later in Boston. The official cause was consumption, but some suspected poisoning. Some historians wonder if Anthony was his father. The dates don't quite line up, but both men shared a defiant spirit. Anthony died in 1837, a prosperous patriarch.

Key Takeaways

The Howe family controlled Anthony's marriage, labor, and manumission to suit their own needs and reputation.

Anthony's carpentry and hired-out work earned him property and respect in Wilmington. But legal freedom stayed out of reach until the mid-nineteenth century. He could build a life and still not own it.

Free Black artisans in Wilmington's building trades gave Anthony his start. They also built the network that carried antislavery writing southward. Early Black politics was strongest in Southern Black communities.

After Walker's Appeal, southern authorities cracked down hard. They passed sedition laws and Georgia offered a bounty. They saw Black print as a direct threat and moved fast to stop it.

Whether or not Walker was Anthony's son, both lives show a defiance that was passed down and rooted in their own communities, not borrowed from faraway abolitionists.

Chapter 2: Those Pestiferous Moores

Overview

A family can build a fortune through violence and slavery, then pass the name to an heir who has no fortune of his own. As the country that rewarded that family begins to split, what will he do to hold onto his place?

A Dynasty Built on Enslavement

The Moores reached South Carolina around 1675. James Moore got rich by raiding Native peoples and selling them as slaves. His sons moved north in the 1720s. They seized more than eighty thousand acres along the Lower Cape Fear and brought over a thousand enslaved people with them. Six of the region's ten biggest slaveholders were their relatives. When they fought the Stamp Act, King George III called them "those pestiferous Moores."

The Heir

Alfred Moore Waddell was born at Moorefields in 1834. He was descended from a Supreme Court justice and two generals. He moved to Wilmington in 1856. By 1860, he claimed no assets of value.

Key Takeaways

• The Moores built their fortune by turning captive Native people and imported Africans into land, power, and political influence. They didn't just farm.
• A small web of relatives controlled most of the region's biggest slave operations along the Lower Cape Fear. That gave them power over much of public life.
• Fighting the Stamp Act earned them the king's scorn, but it didn't loosen their grip at home. Wealthy colonists who resisted British rule and wealthy slaveholders were often the same people.
• Alfred Moore Waddell carried his family's name into the years before the Civil War. He moved to Wilmington with no declared assets, which showed that a famous name and the right connections could matter more than money people could see.

Chapter 3: The Bellamys Build

Overview

John Dillard Bellamy built the finest house in Wilmington: 10,000 square feet, five levels, twenty-two rooms, Corinthian columns, porches, and a rooftop lookout. He was a man of plain habits, and nobody asked what paid for it. The harder question is what a family passes down, and what it chooses to remember about where its money came from.

Fortune

The family moved in in 1861 with eight children. Bellamy made his fortune from pine-forest plantations where enslaved people made turpentine and raised crops. By 1860 he enslaved 113 people across three counties. He ran the Bank of the Cape Fear and was the largest shareholder in the Wilmington and Weldon Railroad. According to the book, only 0.5 percent of North Carolinians owned more land, and only 0.3 percent enslaved more people. The house was built and paid for by slavery.

Politics

Bellamy broke with relatives who stayed out of politics and became chairman of the New Hanover Democratic Association. He pushed hard for secession and alienated Wilmington's older Whig families. After a fatal duel, he lived under a cloud, and the mansion became his way of proving himself. He named his ninth child Chesley Calhoun for John C. Calhoun. When South Carolina seceded in December 1860, he lined Front and Market with tar barrels, lit a bonfire, and led a torchlit parade.

Kuners

At a Taylor family holiday dinner, the Kuners performed: enslaved men in bright rags, buckram masks, and Spanish moss beards. Their skits sometimes mocked white greed, but the Bellamys remembered them fondly. After dinner they admired the nearly finished house and its two-story quarters for nine enslaved people. The house cost a third more than the First Presbyterian Church, yet only one year's profit at Grist.

Key Takeaways

• The Bellamy mansion was more than a home. It was a public show of wealth and power, and it was built on the forced labor of enslaved people in the turpentine and farming economy.
• Bellamy's radical secessionist politics put him against Wilmington's established Whig families. After a fatal duel damaged his reputation, his lavish home became an attempt to prove his importance.
• The Kuners' performances sometimes made fun of white greed, yet the Bellamys remembered them with affection. This shows how slaveholding families could take in and enjoy the cultural expressions of the people they owned.
• The house cost more than a prominent church, yet amounted to only one year's profit from a single enterprise. That reveals how slavery produced fortunes big enough to pay for extraordinary private luxury.