23-year-old Baptist Spencer was a slave of Henry Mudd in Bryantown, Maryland when he enlisted on December 28, 1863. He mustered into the 19th Regiment at Camp Stanton on January 13, 1864. Spencer spent most of his three years in the Union Army as a teamster assigned to the Quartermaster Corps. This may have saved him from being killed or injured since he did not have to serve as one of the 19th Regiment’s front-line infantrymen at Petersburg and other battles. He was mustered out on January 15, 1867 at Brownsville, Texas.

Spencer’s pension file contains a 1902 affidavit by his wife Frances Robinson Newman:

I do not know my age but I was a grown woman when the war broke out. My first husband was a slave belonging to Henry Mudd and he left and joined company H 19th USCT and served under name of Baptist Spencer in said company from January 1864 to January 1867. He never came back to me after he went away with the Army. He was a kind, loving and affectionate husband and after he went away he sent me money in letters but these letters I have lost. I was pregnant when he went away and he seemed to be very anxious about me and as he went away he kissed me and then as they marched away he kissed my likeness and hallowed back “take good care of yourself and to meet him in heaven if he should be killed.”

I never heard from him after his discharge from the Army nor have any of his friends. I went to meet the Regiment on Federal Hill when it came back to be discharged expecting to meet and greet my husband but I could not find him and none of the men seemed to know of him.

I have not heard of his death but am confident if he had survived he would have come back to me and the little child he was expecting when he went away...

Frances Spencer remarried after the Civil War, to former soldier Moses Newman. But it seems that her first husband Baptist Spencer was not really dead. A Freedman Bank record dated November 7, 1873 showed that he was then living and working as a laborer in Washington, D.C. In 1890, a special Federal Veterans Census shows Baptist Spencer, his wife Frances Newman, and Frances' second husband Moses Newman all living together at the same address in Baltimore, Maryland.