John Bell (Tennessee Politician) - Civil War

Civil War

In the months following Lincoln's election, Bell remained steadfast in his support for the Union. In March 1861, he met with President Lincoln, who, according to Bell, assured him he had no intention of using force against the South. After the Battle of Fort Sumter in April, however, Bell felt he had been deceived. While he still supported preserving the Union, he reasoned that if federal forces invaded Tennessee, the state had a right to defend itself. On April 23, he called for the state to align itself with the Confederacy and prepare a defense against a federal invasion.

Bell's defection to the Confederate cause stunned Unionist leaders. Louisville Journal editor George D. Prentice wrote that Bell's decision brought "unspeakable mortification, and disgust, and indignation," to his long-time supporters. Horace Greeley lamented such an "ignominious close" to Bell's public career. Knoxville Whig editor William Brownlow derided Bell as the "officiating Priest" at the altar of the "false god of Disunion."

In June 1861, Bell travelled to Knoxville in hopes of converting the city's Unionist leaders to the secession cause, and perhaps changing sentiments in East Tennessee, which remained stubbornly pro-Union. On June 6, Bell delivered a speech before a crowd of secessionists at the Knox County Courthouse. Following the speech, he walked across the street to the law office of long-time Whig attorney Oliver Perry Temple, where Temple and several other pro-Union leaders, among them Brownlow, Perez Dickinson, and William Rule, had gathered. Temple later recalled:

Mr. Bell said, in a half-sad and half-complaining tone: "I see that none of my old friends were over to hear me speak." "No," said Mr. Brownlow, "we were not present, and did not intend being. We did not wish to witness the spectacle of your being surrounded by your enemies, who a few months ago were denouncing you as a traitor. We did not wish to hear these men shouting for you and see you in a such a position." Mr. Brownlow then poured forth a torrent of abuse and denunciation of secession. Mr. Bell made no attempt to defend them, nor indeed to defend his own course.

Brownlow, who had supported Bell for over two decades and had named one of his sons after Bell, recalled the incident in Temple's office in his 1862 book, Sketches of the Rise, Progress and Decline of Secession. He stated he had criticized Bell that night with "great pain," and remembered that he and Bell "parted in tears." Temple surmised that Bell's decision to support the Confederacy was driven by panic, for "there was not a drop of disloyal blood in his veins."

After Tennessee seceded on June 8, Bell retired from public life, though his sons and sons-in-law actively supported the Confederate cause. When the Union Army occupied Tennessee in 1862, Bell fled to Alabama, and later to Georgia. After the war, he moved to Stewart County, Tennessee, where he managed his family-owned ironworks. He died at his home near Dover, Tennessee, in 1869, and is buried in Mount Olivet Cemetery in Nashville.