Background
Pleasant was born on July 10, 1857 in Augusta, Georgia, United States, the eldest of the eight children of Bolling Anthony and Martha (Wilson) Stovall. The Stovalls came from France to England with William the Conqueror, and descendants emigrated to colonial Virginia. They intermarried with the Bollings and the Pleasants, whose names became traditional Christian names in the Stovall family.
An ancestor, Thomas Stovall, served in the Revolutionary War under George Rogers Clarke and afterward moved to Georgia; another, Captain Thomas Cooper, fought in both the colonial and Revolutionary wars, and was a member of the Virginia Convention of 1788 which ratified the Constitution.
Pleasant's father fought throughout the Civil War in the Confederate forces and at its close was a captain of artillery. His mother was born in South Africa, the only child of two of the first American missionaries to Africa, Alexander Erwin and Mary Jane Smithey Wilson; her grandfather was the Rev. John M. Wilson, prominent in the early Presbyterian history of North Carolina.