"[3] Hearing that Georgia must "grasp in fraternity the bloody hand of Massachusetts, or align yourselves with gallant South Carolina" shook his views on the need to secede.

[4] He served as a Georgia commissioner to work with the state of Tennessee in the formation of a southern confederacy.

In 1861, Bell served in the Georgia Senate; however, he resigned to join the Confederate States Army during the American Civil War as a captain.

After the war, Bell opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1866 as "legislative folly… intended to harass and humiliate the white people.

In his memoirs, Bell praised the Ku Klux Klan as "a saving factor in the preservation of order and the prevention of lawlessness" for opposing Reconstruction.