John Willis Menard (1838–1893), born in Illinois to free Afro-Creole parents. Details of his early life are scarce. In 1863, Menard, a known, outspoken proponent of black emigration and colonization, was hired as a clerk in the federal Emigration Office (Phillip W. Magness and Sebastian N. Page,
Colonization after Emancipation: Lincoln and the Movement for Black Resettlement [Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2011], 32). In the same year, he served as a member of an exploratory delegation to investigate the suitability of a free black colony in Honduras. According to Magness and Page, upon his return to the port of New York City, Menard "immediately began disseminating information about the colony within the northern free black community" (46). This trip and his return to the United States prompted Menard to write "Home Again," one of three poems attributed to Menard published in the Anglo-African in the latter half of the war. The others are "Voices of Long Ago" (March 28, 1863, [4]), apparently written for the newspaper, and "One Year Ago To-Day: Dedicated to the Emancipated Slaves of the District of Columbia" (May 2, 1863, [1]), reprinted from the Washington Star of April 17, 1863. In the aftermath of the war, Menard settled in New Orleans. In 1868 he was "the first of the black Reconstruction politicians to be elected to Congress" (William E. Gatewood, Jr.,
Aristocrats of Color: The Black Elite, 1880–1920 [Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1990], 276). He was to represent the Second Louisiana Congressional District, but the election was contested, and Menard was never seated as a congressman. In 1871 Menard and his family (wife, Elizabeth, and children Willis, Mary, and Alice) moved to Jacksonville, Florida. According to the historian of Menard's Florida years, upon arriving in Jacksonville, Menard first worked as a postal clerk and later as "deputy collector of internal review for the Florida district" (Bess Beatty, "John Willis Menard: A Progressive Black in Post–Civil War Florida," Florida Historical Quarterly, 59 no. 2 [October 1980]: 123). Menard became involved in Florida politics, first as a Republican and then as an Independent; he returned to the Republican Party in the 1880s. In 1889 Menard returned to Washington, DC, where he worked in the census office. Two years later, he and several other African American leaders founded the Southern States Colored Republican Association (Beatty, 140, 141). Menard died in Washington, DC on October 8, 1893. For more on Menard, particularly his political career, see Bess Beatty, "John Willis Menard: A Progressive Black in Post–Civil War Florida," 123–43.
No comprehensive bibliography of Menard's poetry exists, but during the war he published in the
Anglo-African, Christian Recorder, and Douglass' Monthly. (His contributions to Douglass' Monthly may be limited to a letter he wrote in response to Douglass's negative views of emigration and colonization.) His only collection of poetry, Lays in Summer Lands, was published in 1879.