John Bell's Birthplace

Bell owned slaves yet kept looking for compromise. In 1854 he was the only senator from a southern state to vote against the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and in 1858 he defied the legislature's instructions by voting against Kansas's admission as a slave state. The Constitutional Union Party nominated him in 1860; he finished last of four candidates but carried Tennessee, Kentucky and Virginia. After Fort Sumter and Lincoln's call for volunteers he reluctantly endorsed secession, then left for Alabama and Georgia to avoid the Union occupation of Tennessee.

What the plaque says

John Bell's Birthplace 200 yds. The house of his birth, Feb. 18, 1796, was on this site. Graduate of Nashville's Cumberland College, 1814, he was a state senator in 1817 and Member of Congress, 1827 to 1841, when appointed Secretary of War. He was nominated for the Presidency by the Constitutional Union Party in 1860. He died at Bear Spring, Sept. 10, 1869, and is buried in Nashville.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fort Negley — 8.5 mi
  The largest inland stone fort of the Civil War, built in 1862 on St. Cloud Hill by more than 2,700 conscripted Black laborers, hundreds of whom died.
• National Museum of African American Music — 9.5 mi
  A downtown Nashville museum, opened in 2021, tracing gospel, blues, jazz, rhythm and blues and hip-hop through Black history from 1619 to 2016.
• Ryman Auditorium — 9.6 mi
  The 1892 brick tabernacle in downtown Nashville that was the Grand Ole Opry's home from 1943 to 1974, now a National Historic Landmark and working concert hall.
• Civil Rights Room at the Nashville Public Library — 9.7 mi
  A room in the downtown library with a circular lunch counter, a timeline and oral histories of the 1960 Nashville sit-ins, a few blocks from the stores where they began.

More markers nearby

• John Haywood — 1.9 mi
• Hood's Retreat December 16, 1864 — 3.9 mi
• Travellers' Rest — 4.1 mi
• Hiram and Eveline Overton's Wagon and Blacksmith Shop — 6.0 mi