Baptist Spencer, Private, Company H

From Slavery to the Union Army

Baptist Spencer was born in Charles County, Maryland, probably about 1840 or 1841. His military descriptive record gives his age as 23, his height as five feet ten inches, and his complexion, eyes, and hair as black. His occupation was farmer. Before entering the Army he was enslaved by Henry Lowe Mudd, the wealthy Charles County planter whose Oak Hill plantation stood near Bryantown and Waldorf.

Henry Lowe Mudd was the father of Dr. Samuel A. Mudd. In her 1906 biography of her father, Nettie Mudd remembered that on Henry Mudd's estate there could be seen “more than a hundred slaves.” The surviving 1860 federal slave schedule records 61 enslaved people at Henry Mudd's household. Those figures are not necessarily contradictory. Enslaved people were commonly hired out, and a person absent from the owner's premises when the slave schedule was taken might not appear there. Other records from the Mudd family provide a concrete example: Maria Spencer, another person enslaved by Henry Mudd, later testified that she had been hired out for substantial periods to several other Charles County residents.

Enlistment in the 19th USCT

Spencer enlisted at Charles County, Maryland, on December 28, 1863, for a three-year term and mustered into Company H of the 19th Regiment, U.S. Colored Troops, at Camp Stanton on January 13, 1864. His enlistment transformed his legal status and placed him in a regiment composed largely of formerly enslaved Maryland men. The 19th left Camp Stanton in the spring of 1864 and joined the Army of the Potomac for the campaigns against Richmond and Petersburg.

Spencer's compiled military record shows that much of his wartime service differed from that of the front-line infantrymen in his company. He was detached for duty as a teamster with the Quartermaster Department. Teamsters drove and cared for the Army's wagons and draft animals and moved food, ammunition, equipment, baggage, and other supplies. The work was essential to keeping an army in the field. His detached service also appears to have kept him away from some of the 19th Regiment's most dangerous front-line fighting.

A Husband Leaves for War

The most personal account of Spencer's departure survives in a 1902 affidavit given by Frances Robinson Newman, who said that Baptist Spencer had been her first husband. Frances recalled that she was pregnant when he left to join the Army. She described him as a “kind, loving and affectionate husband.” After leaving, he sent her money in letters, although the letters themselves had been lost by the time she gave her statement.

Frances also remembered their final parting. As the soldiers marched away, Spencer kissed her, then kissed her likeness and called back that she should take good care of herself and that they would meet in heaven if he were killed. It is an unusually intimate surviving glimpse of what enlistment meant to an enslaved Maryland family: military service offered freedom, but it also brought separation and the possibility that husband and wife would never see one another again.

Texas and the Rio Grande

After the principal Confederate armies surrendered in 1865, the 19th USCT was not immediately discharged. The regiment was sent to Texas as part of the large federal military presence along the Mexican border. Spencer's record continued to show detached Quartermaster duty. In February 1866 he was absent from his company under orders from headquarters in the District of the Rio Grande. He remained in federal service until the regiment's final muster-out at Brownsville, Texas, on January 15, 1867. His muster-out record shows that $300 of bounty remained due him.

The Husband Who Did Not Return

Frances expected Spencer to come home. She later stated that she went to Federal Hill in Baltimore to meet the returning regiment, but Baptist was not among the men she found there. She said that she never heard from him after his discharge and that none of his friends seemed to know what had become of him. Believing that he must have died, Frances eventually married another former soldier, Moses Newman.

Yet Baptist Spencer had survived. A Freedman's Savings and Trust Company record dated November 7, 1873 places him in Washington, D.C., working as a laborer. The record gives his birthplace as Charles County, Maryland, his age as 47, and identifies his mother as Lucy Spencer and a brother as Joseph Spencer. The age conflicts with the age recorded when he enlisted, a common problem in nineteenth-century records, but the name, birthplace, and later military evidence support identification of the depositor as the 19th USCT veteran.

An Extraordinary Reunion in the Records

By 1890 Spencer was living in Baltimore. The special federal census of Union veterans listed him as a private of Company H, 19th USCT, at 1120 Hall Street. The surviving census page is particularly striking because Frances Newman and her second husband, Moses Newman, appear in the same household. Thus the man Frances had believed dead after the Civil War was, decades later, living under the same roof with her and the husband she had married after Baptist disappeared.

The surviving documents do not explain how or when Baptist and Frances found one another again, why Baptist did not return to her after his 1867 discharge, or how the unusual Baltimore household came to be formed. Those unanswered questions are part of what makes Spencer's story so compelling. The records take him from slavery on Henry Lowe Mudd's plantation, through three years in the Union Army and service on the Rio Grande, to Washington and finally Baltimore, but they leave the most human part of his postwar story only partly visible.

A Life Connected to the Mudd Family

Spencer's history also connects the story of the 19th USCT directly to one of the best-known families in Charles County Civil War history. He had been enslaved by Henry Lowe Mudd, father of Dr. Samuel A. Mudd. While the Mudd family's written history remembered Oak Hill as a prosperous plantation, Spencer's military and family records show that the plantation was also the starting point for a very different Civil War story: an enslaved man left Charles County, entered United States service, and emerged from the war a free veteran.

Baptist Spencer's story is therefore not principally about the famous doctor or his family. It is about Spencer himself: a farmer held in slavery, a husband facing separation from a pregnant wife, a Union soldier and teamster, a veteran who built a life after emancipation, and a man whose unexpected reappearance in the historical record decades later turns a brief military entry into a remarkable human story.

Sources

• Compiled Military Service Record of Baptist Spencer, Company H, 19th Regiment, U.S. Colored Troops, National Archives.

• Robert K. Summers, Maryland's Black Civil War Soldiers.

• Robert K. Summers, The Assassin's Doctor.

• Nettie Mudd, The Life of Dr. Samuel A. Mudd (1906), in Robert K. Summers's annotated public-domain reprint.

• Freedman's Savings and Trust Company record for Baptist Spencer, November 7, 1873.

• 1890 Special Census of Surviving Soldiers, Sailors, Marines, and Widows, Baltimore, Maryland.

• 1902 affidavit of Frances Robinson Newman in the pension materials reproduced with the Baptist Spencer research file.