[1] 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.

[2] Bellamy was also elected director to the Bellevue Cemetery Company,[3] President of the Industrial Manufacturing Company,[4] Chairman to the New Hanover County Democratic Executive Committee,[5] Chairman to the Third Ward,[6] and was a member of The Rightworthy Grand Lodge of the Independent Order of Odd Fellows of North Carolina representing Cape Fear Lodge No.

[11] In Bellamy's 1942 autobiography, Memoirs of an Octogenarian, which he wrote during his last year of life, he boasted that, "many other bills...were passed" during his time in the General Assembly, but he only went into detail about his role in establishing A&T University explaining he "drafted the charter for the Negro Agricultural College at Greensboro.

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.

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.