Nathaniel Macon was born on the 17th of December, 1758, in the county of Bute, of the then province of North Carolina, in the part of it now Warren, within a few miles of the present village of Warrenton, of poor and respectable parents. His great-grandfather was a Huguenot and came over from France to escape the persecutions consequent upon the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, in 1685. His father, Gideon H. Macon, was born in Virginia, whence he came to North Carolina. His mother was a native of North Carolina and a daughter of Edward Jones, of Shocco. He lost his father in early boyhood, and was left, with many brothers and sisters, in the care of his widowed mother, with such moderate means of support as to require the utmost care and industry to get on even tolerably in the world. He assisted in all the domestic offices and labors common with boys at that day. He acquired the rudiments of education in the neighborhood, at what was called an "old-field school." The application, progress, and good habits of the boy gave such promise of the future man that it was resolved to make every effort to give him a thorough education, and he was accordingly sent to Princeton College, New Jersey. His own inclinations eagerly seconded the hopeful purpose of his friends. While there, he prosecuted his studies with fond diligence, and sought all the avenues to useful knowledge with unflagging zeal. Nor did he relax his efforts in this respect after his return home, devoting to such books as were within his reach all the time he could spare from the ordinary duties of life; but he met with great difficulties, owing to the scarcity of books and his own poverty. In the latter part of his life he was often heard to say that his eyesight failed him sooner than it otherwise would have done, in consequence of his reading so much by firelight in his youth and early manhood, being then too poor to buy candles, his small patrimony having been exhausted during his minority in his support and education. His love for North Carolina was sincere and thorough. In all that concerned her character, her institutions, her welfare, he felt an ever-wakeful solicitude. Although he received his collegiate education in a distant State, he ever after gave a decided preference to the seminaries of his own loved North Carolina. When his son-in-law, William Eaton, Sr., in the year 1823 was about to send two of his sons to Cambridge, he dissuaded him from it and advised him to send them to the University of North Carolina, because, among other reasons, they would there make acquaintances of many of the future men of the State, and contract friendships that would be of service to them in the part they were destined to act in the great drama of life.