Isaac Price was born around 1829 in Albemarle County, Virginia. His owner, John Coles Carter, migrated from Virginia to Missouri in 1852 and owned 126 slaves on multiple farms by the eve of the war. Price worked as a farmer on Carter's land on Lick Farm in Lincoln County. Thomas Cobb, the Black preacher on Carter's land, married Price and his first wife Cary Ann Watson (later Cary Ann Jackson), who was also Carter's slave, sometime around 1863.
On February 28, 1864, Price enlisted in the Union army in Louisiana, Missouri. He mustered into Company D of the 68th USCT Infantry Regiment on March 10 at the Benton Barracks in St. Louis. He enlisted in the army with his brother Joseph Price. His service record describes him as 6 feet, 1 inch tall, with black hair, black eyes, and a black complexion. He served in Tennessee, Alabama, Florida, and Louisiana. From January through March of 1865, Price was sick in the hospital in New Orleans. He returned to the regiment by April, and on April 9, he helped capture Fort Blakeley in Alabama. Price mustered out on February 5, 1866, in Camp Parapet, Louisiana.
Following the war, he first moved to Quincy, Illinois, to reunite with his wife. There, he supposedly discovered that she had given birth to another man's child, and he returned to Missouri. He lived on Lick Farm with his father for two or three years and continued to move around Lincoln and Pike Counties for the rest of his life. At some point after the war, he married Lucinda Price, who died around 1871 of unknown causes. Price married his third wife, Melissa Steele, on August 7, 1879, in Paynesville, Missouri. They had no children together. Following his service, Price claimed near total disability due to rheumatism, deafness, and mumps contracted during his service. He filed for a pension in 1890, but the government initially rejected it. By 1892, he began receiving $6 a month, which increased to $10 a month by 1898. He died on September 16, 1901, in Elsberry, Missouri, of tuberculosis. Following his death, his third wife Melissa received a widow's pension of $8 a month starting in November of 1901. She stopped receiving her pension in 1906 when she married Robert Steele.
