Amelia Green

Amelia Green, a Free Woman of New Bern by Jan Parys

Devastated by the Tuscarora War, 1711–1713, New Bern settlers needed help. They were aided by immigrants from England, Switzerland, the German Palatinate, and France. Slaves also arrived from Africa, and African slavery became a source of labor. Many godly people like the Quakers wanted emancipation for everyone so they helped the slaves obtain freedom.


Like most African-Americans Amelia Green wanted freedom from slavery for her family after she bought it for herself. Amelia petitioned the NC legislature successfully to free her family members. Amelia bought her freedom from Robert Schaw, a plantation owner in the Wilmington, NC, area. He was married to Anne Vail of the New Bern Vail family. Amelia’s children were listed as mulatto indicating they had a white father. There was a local Wilmington area planter named Richard Green and Richard is the name of her first son.

In her September, 1796 petition to the Craven County courts, she stated that all but two of her children, two daughters, had been able to acquire their own freedom by “the fruits of their own industry and meritorious behavior.” In 1796 she tried to emancipate her sixteen year-old daughter, Princess Ann Green. Five years later, she petitioned to emancipate her daughter Nancy Handy and talked of her own aging and not expecting to live much longer.

She lived twenty years longer and saw family members become owners of both real estate and human property. Amelia Green was a remarkable woman who lived in New Bern, North Carolina after she was free.

She became a landowner and the in-law of one of the largest African American slaveholders in the American South, John Carruthers Stanly. The house where Green spent the final decades of her life working to reassemble a family that had been separated because of slavery still stands in New Bern. It is located at 310 George Street. Her home, also known as the Green-Hollister House, was purchased in 1800 by John Carruthers Stanly for Amelia, his wife’s grandmother, to save it from the tax collector.

Located at 411 Johnson Street, the John R. Green House stayed in the family until 1842. The Green family owned a family pew in Christ Episcopal Church, the same church as the John Wright Stanly family. John Green earned his living as a tailor. Amelia was a laundry woman. Green’s story is one of struggle and hard work to be free from slavery, first for herself and then her immediate family members. She accomplished much at almost unimaginable levels for a woman, especially a slave woman.



Sources: Bob Arnebeck, A Shameful Heritage, Washington Post Magazine, January 18, 1889; Roger Davis and Wanda Neal- Davis , Chronology: A Historical Review, Major Events in Black History 1492 thru 1953; Patricia M. Samford, Historic Bath State Historic Site, (draft to be submitted to the North Carolina Historical Review, March 2006 and New Bern’s African American Guide to African American History (a map and explanations).