Henry Eustace McCulloch (December 6, 1816 – March 12, 1895) was a soldier in the Texas Revolution, a Texas Ranger, and a brigadier general in the army of the Confederate States during the American Civil War.
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.
Henry McCulloch shared in his brother Ben's economic attempts in the 1830s, including transporting goods by raft on the Mississippi, once all the way to New Orleans. When Davy Crockett went to Texas in 1835, Henry McCulloch and his brother made plans to meet Crockett's Tennessee Boys at Nacogdoches on Christmas Day. However, Ben contracted measles and was bedridden for several weeks and while ill convinced his brother Henry to return to Tennessee in November 1835. Luckily, the illness kept them from arriving with Crockett at the Alamo.