Background
John Bell was born on February 15, 1797, on his father's farm near Nashville, the son of Samuel Bell and Margaret Edmiston Bell, pioneer settlers of Tennessee. He was a precocious youth.
John Bell was born on February 15, 1797, on his father's farm near Nashville, the son of Samuel Bell and Margaret Edmiston Bell, pioneer settlers of Tennessee. He was a precocious youth.
In 1814, at the age of seventeen, John Bell graduated from Cumberland College, an institution that later became the University of Nashville.
Before John was twenty-one he had been admitted to the bar, had begun practise at Franklin, Tennessee, and had served as senator in one session of the state legislature. Declining reelection, he moved to Nashville where for some years he devoted himself to the practise of his profession and became one of the most eminent of the members of the Nashville bar. In 1827 he began the first of fourteen successive years in the lower house of Congress. In his first campaign he defeated by a considerable majority Felix Grundy, who had the support of the popular idol of his state, Andrew Jackson. Yet Bell was a supporter of "Old Hickory" for the presidency and in his address to the voters in 1826 he had denounced the Henry Clay-John Quincy Adams combination and had urged upon the voters the support of Jackson as the instrument for their destruction.
For some years in Congress Bell was a member of the Jackson party and supported the chief measures of the Jackson administration. He could never be, however, the unquestioning follower of any man, and in time there developed a breach between Jackson and Bell that ultimately made the latter the leader of the Whig party in Tennessee. In Jackson's war against the national bank Bell refused to follow the President despite the latter's threat that if he should "not come out clearly and distinctly against all national banks he" would be "politically destroyed. " In 1834 Bell was the opponent of a fellow Tennessean, James K. Polk, for the speakership of the House, and with the support of anti-Jackson members he won this coveted office. For more than a decade these two men were both political and personal enemies, and not until after Polk had become president were they even on speaking terms. Jackson preferred Polk, who was always a loyal follower.
A complete break with Jackson occurred when Bell became the leading advocate of the presidential candidacy of Hugh Lawson White in opposition to Jackson's selection, Martin Van Buren. Bell still professed allegiance to the principles of the Democratic party; he declared White to be a better Jackson man than was Van Buren; yet Jackson declared that Bell had "turned a good Whig. " This Bell finally admitted on the politician's plea that this new party was pledged to support the policies of the original Jackson party. The Whig party now became and continued for two decades to be the dominant party in Tennessee and Bell was its acknowledged leader.
Despite Jackson's continued efforts, Bell's constituents returned him to Congress until in 1841 he entered the cabinet of President Harrison as secretary of war. He held this position only a few weeks, however, for after Harrison's death his successor, Tyler, rejected the legislative program of the Whigs, and Bell and other cabinet members resigned. For the next six years Bell remained in retirement, but in 1847 he was elected to the United States Senate and he continued in this office till 1859. During this period of twelve years, characterized by the development of an increasingly bitter sectional spirit, Bell distinguished himself as one of the most consistently conservative and nationally-minded Southerners. He was a large slave owner; he had no love for the abolitionists; yet he never entered the camp of the apostles of slavery.
Bell had no sympathy for extremists North or South. As a member of the lower house of Congress he had voted with John Quincy Adams in defense of the right of petition against those who sought to prevent the reception or the consideration of antislavery petitions. In the Senate, when the controversy over the question of slavery in the territories that had been acquired from Mexico threatened a dissolution of the Union, Bell affirmed the constitutionality of congressional prohibition of slavery in the territories, though he opposed the use of this power on grounds of policy. He was the outstanding supporter of President Taylor's plan of avoiding the direct issue by admitting the territories to statehood even though the exclusion of slavery should be the result of this.
Bell also offered a plan of compromise. He objected to certain features of Henry Clay's compromise measures of 1850, but after their passage he gave them his support. In 1854 he parted reluctantly from his Southern colleagues and opposed the reopening of the bitter controversy over slavery by the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. The well-known results of this act were as he had predicted. Four years later he defied instructions from the Tennessee legislature to support the admission of Kansas under the Lecompton constitution and spoke and voted against that attempt to force slavery upon an unwilling people. For his attitude in the slavery controversy he was most bitterly denounced by increasing numbers in the South, but gained commendation in the North. The Whig party was now dead. Bell gave support to the short-lived Americans and even considered the possibility of a uniting of moderate Republicans and former Southern Whigs. To many a Southerner he was "harloting" with the hated Black Republicans. The possibility of such a union passed, however, and secession and civil war drew on apace.
In the momentous presidential campaign of 1860 moderate men, most of them former Whigs, nominated John Bell for the presidency and Edward Everett for the vice-presidency. Their party they called the Constitutional Union Party and their platform was "The Constitution of the country, the Union of the states, and the enforcement of the laws. " But the time for moderation had passed; the slavery question could not be settled by ignoring it; and Bell secured the electoral votes of only three states, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Virginia. His campaign had been a plea for the preservation of the Union, and for some months after Lincoln's election and while states of the lower South seceded he and his followers opposed secession, and Tennessee remained within the Union.
When Lincoln's administration began Bell was in Washington and sought there to promote a compromising spirit and the adoption of a temperate policy that would, he hoped, prevent civil war. But when Maj. Anderson's small garrison at Fort Sumter was fired upon and Lincoln called for troops, Bell was compelled to make what was probably the most momentous decision of his many years in public life. Disapproving secession "both as a constitutional right, and as a remedy for existing evils, " he urged that if the federal government should attempt the coercion of the "seceded States, " Tennessee should enter into "alliance" with them and resist suppression of the "Revolution" "at all hazards, at any cost, and by arms . " Tennessee did as Bell advised. His own career was ended. When the state was invaded by troops of the United States he left for the lower South. Family tradition tells of an old man, heartbroken, who paced the floor lamenting the war and what war brought to the South and to the nation. When the war ended he returned to Tennessee; his health failed; and in Stewart County, near Bear Spring Furnace, he died.
John Bell was a member of the Democratic-Republican party (1817–1825); the Democratic party (1825–1835); the Whig (1835–1854); the American party (1854–1860); the Constitutional Union party (1860–1861); the U. S. House of Representatives from Tennessee's 2nd congressional district (1827–1841).
John Bell was temperate in his emotions, judicial always in the formation of his opinions, yet on occasion powerful in attack upon his enemies.
John Bell was twice married: first, early in life, to Sally Dickinson, and after her death to Jane Erwin Yeatman, wealthy widow of Thomas Yeatman.