Louisiana's 2nd District elects John Willis Menard, a Black newspaper editor, to Congress
With Reconstruction under way, voters in Louisiana's 2nd congressional district went to the polls on November 3, 1868, to fill the seat of James Mann, a Democrat who had died in office. They chose John Willis Menard, a Republican newspaper editor born to free parents of color, making him the first African American elected to the United States Congress. His Democratic opponent, Caleb S. Hunt, contested the result. Menard was never seated.
Menard's victory put a question to the House that it could not answer cleanly: a Black man had been elected, and Congress had to decide whether he could sit. The seat stayed empty, an early sign that Reconstruction's promise of Black political participation would be fiercely disputed.
QWhy was a young Interior Department clerk sent to British Honduras in 1863?
In 1863, during the Civil War, Menard was sent to British Honduras to investigate a proposed colony for newly freed slaves. The assignment came while he was working as a clerk in the Department of the Interior under President Abraham Lincoln. The mission concerned where freed people might settle. He stood for Congress five years later. What he reported is not recorded, and no colony resulted from his trip.
QWhose family did Menard's daughter Alice marry into?
Alice Menard, born in 1861 to Menard and his first wife, Lucy Samuels, married Thomas Van Rensselaer Gibbs. Thomas Gibbs was the son of Jonathan Clarkson Gibbs. Menard had married Lucy in 1859, and after the couple separated he married Elizabeth Mary, in either Jamaica or the U.S. Virgin Islands. The record is uncertain on the place. That second marriage produced two more children. Alice's marriage tied Menard's family to the Gibbs family.
QWhere was John Willis Menard first buried, and why was he moved?
Menard died in the District of Columbia on October 8, 1893, and was first buried at Graceland Cemetery in Washington. That cemetery closed in 1894, about a year after his death, and his remains were moved to Woodlawn Cemetery. He had been dead about a year when the cemetery closed. Woodlawn is his recorded final resting place.
