Background
Isaac Bell was born on November 6, 1846, in New York, the son of Isaac Bell, for many years commissioner of Charities and Corrections of the State of New York.
Isaac Bell was born on November 6, 1846, in New York, the son of Isaac Bell, for many years commissioner of Charities and Corrections of the State of New York.
Isaac Bell was educated in private schools in New York City. He attended Harvard University in 1866, but left without graduating.
Starting his business career in a clerkship with Brown Brothers & Company in New York, Isaac became interested in the cotton business which in those years (from 1870 on) was assuming an extraordinary speculative activity. He determined to establish a brokerage house in the cotton region itself and went to Savannah, Georgia, where he successfully conducted his own office. An attractive offer from the firm of Arthur Barnwell & Company led him to move to Charleston, South Carolina, there becoming a member of that firm, and repeating the success already gained in Savannah.
As his knowledge of the cotton business increased, he determined to carry out what appears to have been his original design, that of uniting actual operations in the cotton region with the speculative market of the North, a familiar method today, but representing a plan then relatively little known in practise. Accordingly he established two houses of his own, one in New Orleans, the other in New York City, under the firm name of Isaac Bell, Jr. , & Company. The venture was profitable, and with the money he had accumulated and inherited he retired from business in 1877 and removed to Newport, Rhode Island.
In the year 1878 Bell married Jeannette Gordon Bennett, the sister of James Gordon Bennett, and affiliated himself with the social and literary circles in which the Bennett family was conspicuous. Bell now took up politics as an avocation and began to play a considerable part as a Democrat in the local public affairs of Rhode Island. He was, however, rather too much of an aristocrat to catch the popular fancy, besides running counter to the traditional prejudices of the region, and a campaign for election to the United States Senate on the Democratic ticket proved a complete failure. President Cleveland, nevertheless, in his effort to consolidate the Democratic support of the Eastern seaboard communities and especially to recognize the wealthier element among the Democrats of New York and the adjacent states, named him minister to the Netherlands. His career in that position (March 1885 - May 1888) was of no special note.
Returning from Europe, Bell became a delegate to the St. Louis convention of 1888 and shared actively in the campaign of that year, but the defeat of President Cleveland for a second term naturally resulted in his retirement from politics; and a decline in health shortly set in which developed into the illness which caused his death.
In the year 1878 Bell married Jeannette Gordon Bennett, the sister of James Gordon Bennett.