He attended high school in Edinburgh and immigrated to the United States at the age of eighteen with only one-hundred dollars in his pocket.

Spence then moved to Norfolk, Virginia, and was employed as a shipping clerk at Robert Soutter & Sons.

Later, he founded the Mercantile Trust and Deposit Company and became an officer of The Eutaw Savings Bank.

He was the president of the Municipal Art Society,[5] active in the formation of the First Presbyterian Church,[1] and a prominent contributor to Johns Hopkins University and Hospital.

[6] He is best known for erecting a thirteen-foot, iron statue of William Wallace, the Scottish martyr, in 1892 in Druid Hill Park[2][3][7] and donating a copy of Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen’s Christus Consolator to Johns Hopkins Hospital in 1896.