[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.
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".
In the south, Catholic Primate, Archbishop Cullen approved MPs breaking their pledge of independent opposition and accepting positions in a new Whig administration.
Already, "thoroughly imbued with the radical separatism of the Fenians", he was the editor of the weekly the Irish Liberator, the paper of the IRB-aligned National Brotherhood of St Patrick.
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.
[12] Under the masthead, "A Journal of Liberty, Literature, and Social Progress", and appealing to "Irishmen of advanced opinions",[13] the editorial stance of the weekly differed from other Irish American publications.
In the Irish Republic, Bell, Scanlon and Dunne promoted the physical-force Fenianism, but they also supported the Radical Republican agenda for Reconstruction, black suffrage and equal rights[17] (and, in addition, disparaged the general clericalism of rival Irish-American papers).
[12] 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.
[19] 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".
'"[17] 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.
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.
[24] 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".