In the election of 1852 John Gray, then editor of the Freeman's Journal, at the urging of the Reverend David Bell stood on the platform of Tenant Right League in Monaghan. Bell found his appeals for unity in support of Gray could not prevail against calls of the Union in danger, and "No Popery". Of the 100 of his fellow Presbyterians who had signed the requisition asking Gray to stand, only 11 had the courage to vote for him. Despairing of constitutional means, in 1864 Bell was inducted into the by Jeremiah O'Donovan Rossa. Escaping arrest, from 1865 he was in exile in the United States where, in contrast to John Mitchel who, already in Ireland, had defended American slavery against the abolitionism of Daniel O'Connell, Bell tried to associate physical-force Irish republicanism with the agenda of black enfranchisement and Reconstruction.