Background
John Bell was born in 1796 in Mill Creek, a hamlet near Nashville, Tennessee. He was one of nine children of local farmer and blacksmith Samuel Bell and Margaret (Edmiston) Bell.
attorney planter politician statesman
John Bell was born in 1796 in Mill Creek, a hamlet near Nashville, Tennessee. He was one of nine children of local farmer and blacksmith Samuel Bell and Margaret (Edmiston) Bell.
He entered Cumberland College, Nashville, at the age of 14.
By the time he was 20 he had graduated from that institution, studied law.
He was admitted to the bar at Franklin. At 21 he was elected to the state senate, but he did not seek reelection.
Returning to the practice of law, he moved in 1822 to Nashville, which remained his place of residence until late in life and where he became one of the city's ablest lawyers. In 1827 Bell successfully made his first race for a seat in Congress.
He thus broke with the Jackson Administration.
Eventually he became the leader of the Whigs in Tennessee.
In 1834 he defeated James K. Polk, a fellow Tennessean and lifelong Jacksonian, for the speakership of the House.
In this difficult era of growing sectional hatreds he generally held to a moderate course.
He opposed President James K. Polk's war with Mexico (1846 - 1848).
In keeping with this was his refusal to back the Kansas-Nebraska bill of Sen. Stephen A. Douglas, which tore former compromises to pieces.
Subsequently, he defied the instructions of his state legislature to vote for the proslavery constitution being considered for Kansas.
His running mate was Edward Everett of Massachusetts.
The aim was conciliation and a marking of time until sectional passions might cool.
This proved vain.
The party carried only three border states -Tennessee, Kentucky, and Virginia. Following the secession of the Deep South, Bell's influence helped to keep Tennessee in the Union until the start of hostilities.
When Fort Sumter was fired upon, however, and Lincoln called for volunteers, Bell sanctioned resistance to the Union as justified in the face of federal efforts to coerce those states which had already left.
He was to spend the Civil War years largely in "exile" in the lower South, much of the time unwell.
He returned to Tennessee at war's end. A conservative of the stamp of Henry Clay and Daniel Webster, Bell was considered one of the ablest senators of his day.
Democratic-Republican (1817–1825), Jacksonian (1825–1835), Whig (1835–1854), American (1854–1860), Constitutional Union (1860–1861).
Bell voted against an attempt to purchase Cuba from Spain, opposed the Homestead bill, and voted in favor of subsidies for the Pacific Railroad.
Bell married his first wife, Sally Dickinson, in 1818. They had five children, Mary, John, David, Fanny, and Sally, before she died in 1832. In 1835, Bell married Jane Erwin Yeatman, a prominent socialite and widow of wealthy businessman Thomas Yeatman.