John Henry was born in November 1750 at Weston, his family’s estate near Vienna in Dorchester County on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. He was the son of Colonel John Henry and Dorothy Rider Henry. His paternal grandfather, the Reverend John Henry, was a Presbyterian minister who had emigrated to America early in the eighteenth century, while his mother descended from early settlers of Dorchester County. Growing up at Weston, Henry belonged to the Chesapeake gentry but lived at some distance from the colony’s largest towns. The Eastern Shore was a landscape of farms, waterways, county courts, and Atlantic trade, sustained in significant part by enslaved labor. His father’s title of colonel and the family estate would have exposed him to local administration and the expectation that educated landowners participate in public affairs. Surviving records offer few intimate details about his childhood, but his educational path demonstrates considerable family investment. Henry attended West Nottingham Academy in Cecil County, Maryland, a respected Presbyterian school that prepared boys for college through classics, mathematics, and disciplined religious study. He then entered the College of New Jersey, now Princeton University, graduating in 1769. Princeton’s curriculum emphasized Latin and Greek, rhetoric, logic, moral philosophy, and civic responsibility. Its Presbyterian intellectual environment also connected Henry to a broad network of ministers, lawyers, and future political leaders. Seeking the highest professional training available to a colonial American lawyer, Henry traveled to London and studied at the Middle Temple, one of the Inns of Court. There he encountered English legal institutions at their source and learned within the metropolitan world governing the colonies. He returned to Maryland in 1775, as political resistance gave way to revolution, and began practicing law in Dorchester County.