Henry Holcombe was born on September 22, 1762 in Prince Edward County, Virginia, United States. He was the son of Grimes and Elizabeth (Busbee) Holcombe. His ancestor, Andrew Holcombe, came to Virginia from England by way of Barbados, and his father left Virginia and settled in South Carolina while Henry was still a boy.
Holcombe said of himself that "in South Carolina, at eleven years of age, he completed all the education he ever had from a living preceptor. "
In 1800 the College of Rhode Island (Brown University) conferred upon him an honorary degree of doctor of divinity.
Holcombe enlisted early in the Revolutionary army and is said to have become an officer by the time he was twenty-one. About then he was converted to Baptist doctrines, and, failing in a search of the Bible undertaken with his father to find sanction for the baptism he had received as a child, he did not rest till he had been baptized again and given a license to preach. It is said that soon, mounted on horseback, he pronounced fervid homilies among his troops.
In 1785 he took charge of Pike Creek Church in South Carolina, the first of a series of small churches with which he was occupied for ten years. In 1788, he was a member of the South Carolina convention which adopted the federal Constitution. In 1795 he went to Savannah and for five years preached acceptably before a congregation so non-exclusively Baptist that the meeting-house, owned by Baptists, was rented to Presbyterians. After 1800, that inchoate state of affairs was remedied, the church was regularly constituted, and he was able to preach to his own people exclusively.
In 1800 he published an address designed to show that religion and civic interest are not incompatible and, as if by way of illustrating his thesis, he founded in 1801 the Savannah Female Asylum, an orphanage, and launched schemes which resulted in ameliorating the state's penal code. He conducted in Savannah a partly literary, partly religious magazine, the Georgia Analytical Repository, and he was instrumental in establishing and sustaining near Augusta a school called the Mount Enon Academy. Many of the Baptists "entertained a prejudice against education and took no interest in institutions of learning except to oppose them, " and when ill health in 1810 incapacitated the tutelary genius of all these works, they spontaneously collapsed.
In the meantime, he had published A Sermon on Isaiah liii, 1, containing a Brief Illustration and Defence of the Doctrines Commonly Called Calvinistic (1791), and A Sermon Occasioned by the Death of Lieutenant General George Washington (1800). Three pastorates awaited him when he had recovered his health, one in Beaufort, one in Boston, and one in Philadelphia. Choosing Philadelphia, he settled there in 1812. The rest of his career was less active. He published The First Fruits (1812) and The Whole Truth Relative to the Controversy betwixt the American Baptists (1820); and he distressed many who were anxious to admire him by his reputed antipathy to foreign missions and by his avowed antipathy, from 1822 onward, toward the whole principle of war, which he could not believe was Christian.
Holcombe is best remembered as a delegate to the South Carolina Convention to ratify the US Constitution, founder of Beaufort College, organizer of Savannah Female Seminary, pastor of the First Baptist Church of Philadelphia, and founder the Philadelphia Peace Society. There is a tablet about him on the church at 17th & Samsom Sts. in Philadelphia.
Holcombe was a devoted Baptist.
In April 1786 Holcombe married Frances Tanner of North Carolina, and a few months later baptized her, her brother, her mother, and his own father, who under the force of his son's argument had relinquished his Presbyterianism.
