Presbyterian minister, tenant-right campaigner

Bell was born in Mosside, County Antrim, the son of a Secessionist Presbyterian minister Thomas Bell. He was educated locally, and in the Royal Belfast Academical Institution collegiate department. In 1839 he became the Secessionist Presbyterian minister of Derryvalley Presbyterian Church close to his father's hometown of Ballybay, in County Monaghan.^[1]

Moved by the "awful spectacles of poverty and wretchedness" in the Famine years of the 1840s, Bell shared platforms with Catholic priests to promote in Ulster the Tenant Right League with its call for fixity of tenure at fair rent. A League meeting he organised in Ballybay in 1850 was overwhelmed by a crowd of 30,000 defying what he decried as the "ruthless powers of our merciless oppressors"—the Established Church landowners and Orangemen.^[1]

In the same year, 1850, Bell lobbied Westminster, calling upon the "Imperial Legislature to render the poor man's property as sacred as that of the rich". When Bell was selected Moderator of the Presbyterian Synod of Armagh, the Young Irelander paper, The Nation (24 May 1851), rejoiced at the "intimation of the deep hold which the principles of the League have taken upon the minds of the.. .farmers of Ulster".^[2] Yet Bell found himself unable to deliver for what Gavan Duffy had optimistically hailed as the "League of North and South". In 1852 the all-Ireland Tenant Right League helped return Duffy and 49 other tenant-rights MPs to Westminster.^[3] Despite efforts of Bell, James MacKnight, William Sharman Crawford and other Protestant activists in the north, none represented the Protestant-dominated Ulster counties.

In the Monaghan election Bell's appeal for unity could not prevail against calls of the Union in danger, and "No Popery". The League candidate, Dr. John Gray, was a Protestant but editor of the pro-Repeal, largely Catholic, Freeman's Journal. Of the one hundred Presbyterians who a signed the requisition asking Gray to stand only eleven had the courage to vote for him.^[4][5]

The unity represented by the League-supported MPs sitting in Westminster as the Independent Irish Party itself proved elusive. In the south, Catholic Primate, Archbishop Cullen approved MPs breaking their pledge of independent opposition and accepting positions in a new Whig administration.^[6][7] In the north League meeting continued to be broken up by Orange "bludgeon men".^[8]

In 1853, members of his Presbytery forced Bell to resign his ministry.^[1] In 1855 Duffy published a farewell address to his constituency, declaring that he had resolved to retire from parliament, as it was no longer possible to accomplish the task for which he had solicited their votes. Duffy emigrated to Australia.^[9]

Physical-force republican

In Manchester, in the Spring of 1864 Bell met Jeremiah O'Donovan Rossa and swore the oath to the Irish Republican ["Fenian"] Brotherhood. Already, "thoroughly imbued with the radical separatism of the Fenians", from 1863 in London he had been promoting the IRB-aligned National Brotherhood of St Patrick and editing the weekly the Irish Liberator. He assured his London-Irish readership of the basis for renewed republican confidence:

We know our fellow countrymen in American will do their duty; and if we had 400,000 volunteers with rifles in their hands, what then was to hinder [our country from rising] from the ashes of her desolation, with the diadem of freedom on her brow, and the sceptre of sovereignty in her hand.

In pursuit of this vision, and escaping what he understood as an "outcry" raised against him in the St. Patrick Brotherhood as a former Presbyterian minister, in October 1864 Bell was sent on a fund-raising lecture tour, and mission to the Fenians, in the United States.^[4]1

Fenians, who were practising Catholics, were resentful of their bishops's vocal hostility to their movement. But they may have regarded as unwelcome Bell's intercession: at a meeting in Dublin in May 1864, Bell opined that "men should be free to follow what forms of religion they pleased; ... free unmolested, even if they believed in no religion at all". Such liberality appeared only to confirm the charge that Fenianism actually encouraged infidlity.^[10]

In the summer of 1865 Bell was on the executive council of the IRB, meeting with, Rossa, James Stephens, Thomas Clarke Luby, and Charles Kickham to discuss proposal to issue bonds in the United States "to meet the emergency of an impending fight". Deliberations were cut short in September when police raided the offices of the Irish People and there was a general round up of the Fenians in Dublin. Bell fled first to Paris, then to the United States.^[4]

In support of Grant and Reconstruction

From 1867, with Michael Scanlon, Bell began producing the Irish Republic in Chicago. Under the masthead, "A Journal of Liberty, Literature, and Social Progress", and appealing to "Irishmen of advanced opinions",^[11] the editorial stance of the weekly differed from other Irish American publications.

Most American Fenians voted for the Democrats and welcomed the journalistic support they had been given by John Mitchel.^[12] Having already in Ireland defended the institution of American slavery against the abolitionism of Daniel O'Connell,^[13][14] the former Young Irelander had wholly identified with southern secession. In the Irish Republic Bell and Scanlon promoted the physical-force Fenianism, but they also supported the Radical Republican agenda for Reconstruction, black suffrage and equal rights^[15] (and, in addition, disparaged the general clericalism of rival Irish-American papers).^[16] Their position was strengthened by Republican leaders who in 1865 lionised the Irish taken prisoners in the April and June Fenian raids into Canada, and who called on the Johnson administration to recognise a lawful state of war between Ireland and England. Sensing the opportunity to win over Irish voters (many of whom would have served under his Union command), in 1867 Ulysses S. Grant persuaded Bell and Scanlon to move the Irish Republic to New York to help his presidential bid in that crucial state.^[17]

Opposition to Tammany-Hall Fenianism

The weekly cautioned readers "interested in the labor question" from associating themselves with John Mitchel (a "miserable man") and with a "diabolical" Democratic plan to impose upon blacks in the South, "as a substitute for chattel slavery, a system of serfdom scarcely less hateful than the institution it is intended to practically prolong". The Democratic Party policy in the South was nothing less than "an attempt to attach to the laborer in America those medieval conditions which even Russia [ Emancipation of the Serfs, 1861 ] has rejected".^[18]

Bell, in New York, also criticised the Fenian leadership of John O'Mahony. Although O'Mahony and his paper, The Irish People, did eventually swing behind Grant and the Republicans, Bell did not believe that O'Mahony was convinced of the need to "cleanse" the spirits of the Irish in America: "Let our people fling off the scales of bigotry and declare that all men are entitled to 'life, liberty, and happiness.'"^[15]

O'Mahony, however, was ousted as the President of the Fenian Brotherhood in 1866 by a faction led by William B. Roberts, a wealthy New York City dry-goods merchant, which closely identified with the Democratic-Party machine, Tammany Hall.^[19] The new president John O'Neill was determined to continue with assaults upon Canada, and to do so without regard to questions about his appropriation of funds or lack of preparation.^[20] In this he clearly saw himself opposed by Bell and Scanlon. Writing from a prison cell, where he had been detained on Grant's express order following command of his third Fenian raid into Canada (see Battle of Eccles Hill) in May 1870, O'Neill ascribed to Bell and Scanlon an hostility toward the Fenian Brotherhood "strongly tinctured with ruffianism".^[21] In 1867 in New York City, Scanlon (presumably in league with Bell) established a separate Irish Republican Club presided over by Thomas J Masterson a prominent member of the Shoemakers Union and later Secretary of the city's Workingmen's Union.^[19]

The Irish Republic ceased publication in 1873. At that point it was clear that indifference in the north to the fate of blacks in the south, economic depression and the scandals of his administration had made it impossible for Grant, in his second term, to continue with reconstruction. In the 1874 mid-term elections the Democrats again swept up Irish votes.^[17] In October 1875, as chairman of the Irish Republican Association, Bell issued an address to the Irish citizens of New York City admonishing those who in voting for the Tammany-Hall nominees "allow themselves to become the tool of shameless plunderers".^[22]

Last years

Meanwhile, in Ireland, with Bell's vision of battalions of Irish-American Civil-War veterans landing in Cork dispelled, it also appeared that physical force republicanism had run it course. In March 1879, John Devoy, the head of Clan na Gael, then the main Fenian organisation in America, met with the Irish MPs Joseph Biggar and Charles Stewart Parnell in France to describe a "new departure". The Fenians would abandon plans for armed revolt and support the drive for Irish Home Rule, provided the Home Rule League backed the campaign of tenant farmers against landlords.^[23] It was a return to Bell's original Ballybay commitment—the struggle for rights to the land.

In 1844 Bell married (1844) Elizabeth Clarke of Bailieborough, County Cavan; they had at least one son. Towards the end of his life, Bell was again a Presbyterian minister, in Brooklyn, New York, where he died in April 1890, age 72. Bell is buried in Flushing Meadow, New York. ^[1][24]