Walter LaFayette Bell (1889-1976) was born in Butterfield, Missouri, son of Jonas Bradley Bell (1843-1931) and Martha Ann Cooper (1865-1890). He married Ruth Rankin (1900-1975), born in Jonesboro, Arkansas, daughter of James Lewis Rankin (1854-1928) and Mary Elizabeth Dawson (1860-1912). Ancestry traced to John Bell (1668-1713) who died in Surry County, Virginia and Robert Rankin (1749-1816) of the Carolinas and Kentucky, as well as many other ancestors. Ancestors, descendants and relatives lived in Illinois, Missouri, Utah, Tennessee, Kentucky, Virginia, Arkansas, Texas, Indiana, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Iowa, Mississippi, South Carolina and elsewhere.

Covering the same ground as the major motion picture The Free State of Jones, starring Matthew McConaughey, this is the extraordinary true story of the anti-slavery Southern farmer who brought together poor whites, army deserters and runaway slaves to fight the Confederacy in deepest Mississippi. "Moving and powerful." -- The Washington Post. In 1863, after surviving the devastating Battle of Corinth, Newton Knight, a poor farmer from Mississippi, deserted the Confederate Army and began a guerrilla battle against it. A pro-Union sympathizer in the deep South who refused to fight a rich man’s war for slavery and cotton, for two years he and other residents of Jones County engaged in an insurrection that would have repercussions far beyond the scope of the Civil War. In this dramatic account of an almost forgotten chapter of American history, Sally Jenkins and John Stauffer upend the traditional myth of the Confederacy as a heroic and unified Lost Cause, revealing the fractures within the South.