Columbus Delano, (June 4, 1809 - October 23, 1896) was a lawyer, rancher, banker, statesman and a member of the prominent Delano family. Delano was elected U.S. Congressman from Ohio, serving two full terms and one partial one. Prior to the American Civil War, Delano was a National Republican and then a Whig; as a Whig he was identified with the faction of the party that opposed the spread of slavery into the Western territories, and he became a Republican when the party was founded as the major anti-slavery party after the demise of the Whigs in the 1850s. During Reconstruction Delano advocated federal protection of African-Americans civil rights, and argued that the former Confederate states should be administered by the federal government, but were not part of the United States until they met the requirements for readmission to the Union.

On his resignation from Grant's cabinet, Delano returned to Mount Vernon where for the next twenty years he served as president of the First National Bank of Mount Vernon. He was a longtime trustee of Kenyon College, which awarded him the honorary degree of LL.D.; among his charitable and civic donations was his endowment of Kenyon's Delano Hall; this building was in use until it was destroyed by a fire in 1906. His Lakeholm mansion, built in 1871 at the outskirts of Mount Vernon, is now part of Mount Vernon Nazarene University.  On April 3, 1880, John W. Wright, a judge from Indiana, was convicted at trial of having assaulted Delano on a Washington, D.C. street corner on October 12, 1877. Wright, who had been an Indian Agent in the Interior Department while Delano was Secretary, had been convicted of fraud, and blamed Delano. On the day of the assault he was in the company of Walter H. Smith, formerly Solicitor of the Department of the Interior; Wright was accused of provoking a fight by questioning Delano's honesty as Secretary of the Interior, and then striking Delano with his walking stick. Wright claimed that Delano had been verbally harassing him, and that he then felt compelled to defend himself. Delano did not sustain serious injuries; Wright's defense was weakened by witness testimony that after the assault, he claimed credit for it, and stated that he would have continued if passers-by had not intervened. Wright was sentenced to 30 days in jail and fined $1,000. On April 8, 1880 President Rutherford B. Hayes pardoned Wright, with his release from custody conditional upon payment of the fine.  On December 3, 1889 Delano was elected President of the National Wool Growers Association, a lobbying group organized to advocate for tariff protection of the national wool industry. The association had been formed in 1865, and became more active in the 1880s as a response to the decline in domestic wool production; wool growers faced increasing overseas competition, and had gone from 50 million sheep producing wool in 1883 to 40 million in 1888.

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