A descendant of slaveholding planters, he served as a minister in many churches in Tennessee, Alabama and Missouri in the Antebellum South.
[2] His paternal grandfather, Henry Young, immigrated from England to the United States as a ship-carpenter, settling in Baltimore, Maryland.
[2] His mother, Lucinda Hyder, was born in Carter County, Tennessee; her ancestors had immigrated to the United States from Germany.
[2] Young studied medicine briefly with a physician in Rheatown, Tennessee, but he decided to serve the Methodist Episcopal Church instead.
[2] Additionally, he received a Doctor of Divinity from Florence Wesleyan University during the civil war.
[2][3] He was recommended by Reverend Alexander Little Page Green to serve as minister for the Cumberland Iron Works from 1846 to 1848.
[2] During the American Civil War, Young was a staunch supporter of the Confederate States of America.
[2] The essay was a response to a racist text entitled The Negro, authored by Buckner H. Payne under the pseudonym of "Ariel,"[4] which suggested blacks harked back to Eve's affair with a "subhuman beast" (sic).
[5] Even though Young "unashamedly admitted to anti-black prejudices" and failed to believe in the "social equality of the Negro," Young offered a scientific criticism suggesting there was only one human species regardless of skin color, citing Carl Linnaeus, George S. Blackie and Louis Agassiz.
[3] Young served as the Financial Secretary of the Board of Trust of Vanderbilt University from its founding in 1874 to 1882.