John Levi Underwood was born in Sumterville, Alabama in 1836 and was educated in the best institutions of the time. He was converted to Christianity at the age of ten and was baptized into the fellowship of the Baptist church the next year in Black Hawk, Mississippi. In 1853, he entered Oglethorpe University at Milledgeville, Georgia, graduating with honors two years later. In 1857, he entered Columbia Theological Seminary in South Carolina where he was taught by the great Presbyterian divine, Dr. James Henley Thornwell. Completing the course there in 1859, he went to Europe to continue his studies, but returned to his home State when the War Between the States broke out, enlisting in the fall of 1861 as a private in the 20th Alabama Regiment under Col. Q.W.

Garrett. While at Vicksburg in 1863, he was commissioned as Chaplain of the 30th Alabama Regiment under Col. W.B. Shelby, but after contracting typhoid fever, he was forced to resign from the army in December. After the war, Underwood settled in Decatur County, Georgia, and pastored a number of churches in the State while raising a large family of eight daughters and five sons. In his later years, he founded and edited a newspaper, practiced law, served as Mitchell County Court judge and as President of Bethel College in Cuthbert. Afflicted with lip cancer, he spent his last three years in Kellam Hospital in Richmond, Virginia, where he died in 1907.

He was buried in Blakely, Georgia.