Early Life
McCulloch was born in Rutherford County, Tennessee, one of twelve children of Alexander McCulloch and Frances Fisher LeNoir. His father, a Yale University graduate, was an officer on Brig. Gen. John Coffee's staff during the Creek War of 1813 and 1814 in Alabama; his mother was a daughter of a prominent Virginia planter. The family had been wealthy, politically influential, and socially prominent in North Carolina before the American Revolution, but Alexander McCulloch had wasted much of his inheritance and was unable even to educate his sons. (Two of Henry McCulloch's older brothers briefly attended a school in Tennessee taught by their neighbor, Sam Houston.) After several moves, the family settled at Dyersburg, where one of their closest neighbors was David Crockett — a great influence on both McCulloch and his older brother, Ben McCulloch, who also would become a Confederate brigadier general.
Read more about this topic: Henry Eustace McCulloch
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“I realized how for all of us who came of age in the late sixties and early seventies the war was a defining experience. You went or you didn’t, but the fact of it and the decisions it forced us to make marked us for the rest of our lives, just as the depression and World War II had marked my parents.”
—Linda Grant (b. 1949)
“The literature of the poor, the feelings of the child, the philosophy of the street, the meaning of household life, are the topics of the time. It is a great stride. It is a sign,—is it not? of new vigor, when the extremities are made active, when currents of warm life run into the hands and the feet.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)