James Madison Bell, sometimes called the "Bard of the Maumee" for the region near Lake Erie with which he was associated, was a public, performing poet who devoted his artistic energies to the abolitionist cause and to versified analyses of post-Civil War America. In the rhetorical tradition of such well-known writers of the mid-nineteenth century as Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Cullen Bryant, and John Greenleaf Whittier, Bell used his poetry as oratory to support his beliefs and values. He mounted a rhetorical campaign to attack the institution of slavery and to defend black human rights.

Other than his birth in Gallipolis, Ohio, near the Maumee River, little is known of Bell's family or his early life. It is known that he moved to Cincinnati in 1842 and remained there until 1853, during which time he worked as a plasterer with his brother-in-law, George Knight, while he attended a high school...