Nancy J. Price (maiden name: Jackson) was born into slavery around 1835 in Albemarle County, Virginia. Her owner was John Coles Carter, who migrated from Virginia to Missouri in 1852 and owned 126 slaves by 1860. Carter hired Nancy out to Daniel Draper, who owned a neighboring farm. While working on Draper's farm, she engaged in a relationship with Stephen Webb, another hired slave. They had two children together: Nicolas and Fanny. The couple did not marry, because her owner did not approve of the match. After returning to Lick Farm, she married Joseph Price, probably sometime in the late 1850s. They had two children: Queen, born March 1860; and Thomas, born September 1863. Both Queen and Thomas, however, died of diarrhea in Quincy, Illinois, in October 1865. Carter reportedly threatened to sell her because she did not have more children. 

Her husband died on March 27, 1865, and Nancy moved to Epworth, Iowa, for about a year. She secured a widow's pension, but she lost it when she remarried in 1866. While in Iowa, she gave birth to a daughter named Adeline. The child's father was Henry Herested, the son of James Herested, a White man with whom she had found work. She soon returned to Missouri and married Commodore Redd in 1866. They had three children together: Fielden, Charley, and Pressley. Nancy was a frequent witness for many of Carter's former slaves' pension applications. After Commodore Redd's death, she began receiving a widow's pension of $8 a month in 1903. The pension had increased to $12 a month by the time of her death on August 17, 1914, in Clarksville.