Beverley Dandridge Tucker (November 9, 1846 – January 17, 1930) was the second bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Southern Virginia. Four of his sons also distinguished themselves within the Episcopal Church.
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Early and family life
Born in Richmond, Virginia, on November 9, 1846, Beverley Dandridge Tucker was one of eight children of Nathaniel Beverley Tucker (then a journalist and printer) and his second wife, Jane Shelton Ellis (1820-1901). The Tuckers (and Dandridges) were among the First Families of Virginia, owned plantations and enslaved people, and were proud of their descent from English ancestors. George Tucker of County Kent, England, emigrated to Bermuda about the year 1619, and his descendant, the lawyer and judge St. George Tucker (Tucker's great-grandfather), moved from Bermuda to Virginia in about 1770.
Tucker's father served as U.S. Consul in Liverpool, England, an important trading point for Virginia cotton, from 1857 until joining the Confederate cause in 1861 upon Virginia's secession from the Union. He then represented the Confederacy in the same locale. Young Beverley thus received his early education in English and Swiss schools, and also studied at the University of Toronto. During the American Civil War, Tucker returned to Virginia and enlisted in the Confederate States Army, becoming a private in the Otey battery and witnessing the final eighteen months of the Confederacy.
After the Confederacy was defeated, Tucker taught school for five years in Winchester, Virginia. He also took classes at the University of Toronto and taught school before entering the Virginia Theological Seminary in Alexandria, Virginia, in 1871, where he found his life's work and graduated in 1873. He received honorary degrees from Roanoke College in 1897 and from the College of William and Mary.