He served as President of Massachusetts Bank, and was a highly successful Boston merchant, owning and operating what was then the precursor to 19th- and 20th-century style department stores.

He was born to Samuel Eliot, a Boston publisher and bookseller; and Elizabeth Marshall, from the West Indies.

[4] Eliot married Elizabeth Barrell of Boston, and married a second time in 1786 to Catherine Atkins, daughter of Dudley and Sarah (née Kent) Atkins of Newburyport, Massachusetts.

The second marriage produced six children, one being Samuel Atkins Eliot.

His granddaughter, Mary Elizabeth Bray (1810–86), was married to Hamburg banker Johann Heinrich Gossler III (1805–1879), owner of Berenberg Bank and a member of the Berenberg-Gossler banking dynasty.