Joseph Price was born around 1840 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. Prior to 1861, Price worked as a farmer and lived on a piece of Carter's land known as Lick Farm in Lincoln County. Sometime before the war, Price married Nancy Jackson, who was also one of Carter's slaves. They had two children together: Queen, born in March 1860; and Thomas, born in September 1863.

Price enlisted as a private in the Union army on February 28, 1864, in Louisiana, Missouri, along with his brother Isaac and his half-brother Manuel. He mustered into Company D of the 68th USCT Infantry Regiment on March 10 at the Benton Barracks in St. Louis. His service record describes him as 5 feet, 10 inches tall, with black hair, black eyes and a black complexion. Price saw action throughout the South--in Tennessee, Alabama, and Florida. Price died on March 27, 1865, in Barrancas, Florida. His cause of death was given as peritonitis, an inflammation of the internal tissue of the abdomen.

Following his death, his widow Nancy briefly lived in Iowa for a year before returning to live in Missouri. Their children both died in October 1865 before Nancy received word of Joseph's death. She received a pension in 1865, but she lost it when she married Commodore Redd in 1866. She received another pension in 1903, valued at $8 per month. The government increased it to $12 a month by the time she died on August 17, 1914, in Clarksville, Missouri.