Col. John Thomas Price was born in Arrow Rock, Missouri, July 13, 1836. His father, Dr. William Price, a native of Maryland, commenced the practice of Medicine here, and on September 24th, 1835, married Mary Ellen Sappington, the youngest daughter then living of Dr. John Sappington. John T., or as he is familiarly called, Col. Tom. Price, is, therefore, the eldest of the six children now alive, who were born of this union. The rest are Mrs. E. J. Collins, of Arrow Rock, and Capt. William M., and Stephen G. Price, commission merchants, of St. Louis, and the Misses Mary Alice and Hope Azola Price, who reside at the homestead of their mother, yet living near Arrow Rock, Missouri. Dr. Wm. Price, after a lucrative practice of thirty years, in which he vindicated himself to be a peer of the many able physicians whom the reputation and success of Dr. Sappington attracted to this vicinity, died in 1865 at his beautiful residence, near the above town, which had just been complete when the war broke out, and is one of the most attractive houses in central Missouri. It is here that Col. Price indulges occasionally in those literary, political, and philosophic speculations which are a necessity to any man of the education and intellect which he possesses, while at the same time not neglecting those essential of our physical existence, which the management of several thousand acres of farming land enables him very easily to acquire. He is one of the most genial and cultivated gentlemen of the many whom we met in this section—the Athens of Saline county; and therefore a short sketch of his past life is well justified, though obtained with difficulty. We learned that it was a cardinal principle with Dr. Price to give all of his children a complete education, and for that purpose he set apart six thousand dollars for each one, as they grew up, to use at their option in this matter. To those who know John T., it is superfluous to add that he consumed his full sum, and would have used double if the paternal exchequer had permitted; valuing, as he does, intellectual and spiritual treasures beyond all price. And setting little store to that earthly dross which moth and rust doth so easily corrupt, and thieves so readily steal. At the age of fourteen, after having attended the best local schools about home, he was sent to New Haven, Connecticut, preparatory to entering a college, where two of his cousins, Col. Vincent and Gen. John S. Marmaduke, were then students. He was well advanced already, for after one year of study in Latin and Greek, he entered the Freshman class, and graduated in his twentieth year, one of its youngest members, in 1856. After studying law with Judge Krum in St. Louis, in the year 1857, not content, as yet, he spent the summer of ’58 at the University of Virginia, where William and Stephen Price then were, as a student in the chemical laboratory and from Charlottsville went to Europe. There he spent two years, being six months at Heidelberg; and besides the English language, we are informed he is the master of three others, German, French, and Spanish. He returned home on the eve of the election of 1860, and although in favor of Bell and Everett, the last representatives of the old whig party, in whose teachings of nationalism as opposed to sectional controversy, Col. Price had been reared – his father having always been a whig – after Lincoln was elected he opposed secession in public speeches at Marshall and Arrow Rock, with all the force and influence he could summon Saline county, being the centre of a large slave-holding interest, and the home of C. F. Jackson, his uncle by marriage, and the then Governor of Missouri, was the hot-bed of “Southern Rights,” and with party feeling ready to burst into organized war, it required not only strong convictions, but great boldness of character, even in a man of Colonel Price’s high social position, to resist the popular torrent. After argument had ceased, and the sword was unsheathed, on the first day of May 1861, Colonel Price was commissioned by the secretary of war a second lieutenant in the fifth infantry of the regular U. S. Army. Prefering to perform no acts except those incident to regular war, and not to participate in conflicts about home and among his own kindred – nearly all of whom where on the other side, and among them both his own brothers, he sought military service, honorable, but necessary, as remote as possible, and had the good fortune to be employed chiefly in the Adjutant General’s department. His first assignment of duty was at Fort Columbus, New York harbor, in the drilling and equipment of recruits, several detachments of which he distributed to the armies of Virginia in the summer of ’61, but in the fall of that year, he was chosen aid-de-camp on the staff of General C. F. Smith, who was ordered from Fort Columbus to Paducah, Kentucky, to collect and organize a column, which subsequently moved to Fort Donelson, and thence to Shiloh, and the sea. In the winter of ’62, however, Colonel Price was transferred to the headquarters of the Mississippi department, and there acted as adjutant general of the district of St. Louis, on the staff of General Hamilton, a brother-in-law of General Halleck, then chief commander of the department. St. Louis at this time was a vast camp, for the organization and shipment of troops to Tennessee, and when General Halleck, on the eve of his departure, took the field in person to command that army, Colonel Price as again promoted to be an aid-de-camp on his staff. In that capacity, alongside of Generals Grant, Sherman and Thomas, McPherson and Sheridan, the two latter of whom were also staff officers of General Halleck. Colonel Price served with the Tennessee army until Halleck was called to Washington to superintend, under Secretary Stanton, the strategic movements of all the United States armies. Therefore the staff of General Halleck was largely disbanded, and Colonel Price was returned to St. Louis, as chief mustering and disbursing officer of volunteers for the Mississippi department, having charge of hundreds of thousands of dollars, without any bond, and payable on his own individual check at the U. S. sub-treasury. Here he mustered into the U. S. service the commands of Generals F. P. Blair and Clinton B. Fisk, Governor Fletcher being a colonel of one, paying the expenses of collecting, drilling, and feeding the recruits, and large sums in bounties, etc., and as many irregularities then existed, he composed a phamphlet giving details of uniform action, in respect to this branch of the service, which afterwards became the basis of a fuller one issued from the adjutant general’s office. These duties being very onerous and responsible, while not very pleasant to a man indisposed to make money out of his office, opportunities and temptations to which were very abundant, Colonel Price, in the fall of ’62, accepted an offer from Governor Gamble, by consent of the secretary of war to command the Ninth Missouri cavalry, but as a vacancy occurred in the First Missouri cavalry, of which a regular U. S. army officer was commander, Colonel Price preferred to serve under him as lieutenant colonel, rather than accept a raw regiment. With this command he acted in Arkansas and Tennessee, but as the companies of it had been scattered in different departments, and could not be collected for any brilliant service, and he was shortly promoted to a captaincy of the Fifth infantry U. S. A., he asked to be relieved and put in command of his own company, then stationed in New Mexico, where he went in the fall of ’63, and served until it became evident that the toils of the Union armies were fast closing around the corpse of the rebellion. During the last year of our war, the Emperor Maximillian was at the height of his power in Mexico; while President Juarez, driven to El Paso, with some of his staff officers at work as laborers in the quartermaster’s department of Fort Bliss, headquarters of the 5th Infantry, was, during the same year, flooding New Mexico with emissaries, seeking aid in the form of American soldiers and officers, to what seemed to be the dying cause of liberty in that republic. Col. Price, seeing no prospect or necessity for his regiment of regulars to be called from camp life on the frontier, eastward, where the death struggle of secession was then imminent; and preferring, at any rate, foreign to domestic war, determined to throw up his commission, so as to be in a condition to take part against French imperialism. This he did more readily on account of chronic rheumatism, which he contracted by sleeping on the ground, in crossing the plains, and required time and the hot springs of New Mexico for a cure. Col. Price hoped to combine a body of Federal soldiers, who would be mustered out of the U. S. service, with some ambitious ex-Confederates; but when the war ended Maximillian had weakened, while Juarez had strengthened, so as to be more independent, and then, what was wholly unaccountable, Generals Price, Shelby & Co. took the wrong side, thus sinking to nothingness in Mexico, when, by taking the other side, they might have been heroes, and forever regarded as the liberators of a nation. When these dreams, however, had faded, Col. Price, though still in the city of Chihuahua, and in correspondence with the Mexican government, hearing of the death of his father, which occurred September 30, 1865, immediately returned home, residing most of the time since with his mother, and assisting to keep intact a large landed estate through a long period of hard times and high taxes. In the spring of 1866, he opened a law office at Marshall, and helped to edit the Saline County Progress, strongly advocating the enfranchisement of the southern people; but when President Johnson and the Blairs reorganized the democratic party, subsequently, he withdrew from the paper and made an independent canvass for congress, as a conservative republican. He claimed then, as now, that “democracy” is a misnomer for the opposition to the northern monopolies; that it died with the war, and its name only keeps the north in power; that the new issues arising since our war, should have given us new names, new policies, new leaders, and a new era of peace and prosperity. He has since taken part in several canvasses as an independent republican, but always “scratches” his ticket in favor of the best men of either party. In religious matters Col. Price is as liberal, original, and independent as in politics. He thinks when no believer in Christ shall vote for a man who is not likewise a practical Christian, in his judgment, and that when this kind of virtue is generally elevated to office, as a matter of paramount importance to mere political differences, in contrast to the demagogues, liars, and thieves, now generally in office, the kingdom of God will have been established, to endure for ages, and that America, with its system of free suffrage, is the stone cut out of a mountain, which will some day fill the whole earth. In other words, it will represent a government of God’s rulers, for the benefit of God’s children. If not orthodox, he is at least patriotic. In 1866, December 5, Col. Price married Miss Sarah M. Bradford, of Arrow Rock, Missouri, who died December 30, 1870; and her death, together with that of an infant son, born September 24, of the same year, occasioned him much religious study for several years afterward. Of this union, Eulalia May Price, born June 12, 1868, remains to cheer her father.
