Samuel Augustus Maverick was the oldest son of Samuel Maverick, a Charleston businessman, and his wife Elizabeth Anderson. His Maverick ancestors had arrived in the New World in 1624, before emigrating to Barbados and later to Charleston. After his paternal grandfather died, in 1793 his grandmother, Lydia Maverick (nee Turpin), married American Revolutionary War general Robert Anderson. In October 1802, his father married Anderson's daughter Elizabeth, and nine months later, on July 23, 1803, Maverick was born at his family's summer home in Pendleton District, South Carolina. To his family, Maverick was known as "Gus".