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