
Columbus Delano (4 June 1809 – 23 October 1896) was a member of the US House of Representatives (W-OH 10) from 4 March 1845 to 3 March 1847 (succeeding Alfred P. Stone and preceding Daniel Duncan), from OH-13 from 4 March 1865 to 3 March 1867 (succeeding John O'Neill and preceding George W. Morgan) and from 3 June 1868 to 3 March 1869 (interrupting Morgan's terms), as Commissioner of Internal Revenue from 11 March 1869 to 31 October 1870 (succeeding Edward A. Rollins and preceding Alfred Pleasonton), and United States Secretary of the Interior from 1 November 1870 to 30 September 1875 (succeeding Jacob Dolson Cox and preceding Zachariah Chandler).
Biography[]
Columbus Delano was born in Shoreham, Vermont in 1809, a distant cousin of Ulysses S. Grant, and he was raised in Mount Vernon, Ohio, became a lawyer in 1831, and joined the National Republican and Whig parties. He served as Knox County prosecuting attorney from 1835 to 1839 and served in the US House of Representatives from 1845 to 1847, denounced the Mexican-American War, lost in his 1848 gubernatorial bid, served as a delegate to the 1860 Republican National Convention, raised and equipped Union Army troops during the American Civil War, returned to the US Congress from 1865 to 1867 and from 1868 to 1869, and opposed President Andrew Johnson's institution of civil governments in the former Confederate states during Reconstruction (believing that only the US Congress could do so). Delano supported Ulysses S. Grant's presidential bid in 1868, and he was rewarded with the offices of Commissioner of Internal Revenue from 1869 to 1870 and Secretary of the Interior from 1870 to 1875. He advocated for the protection of African-American civil rights, supervised an expedition to Yellowstone in 1871 which ultimately led to it becoming a national park, supported the relocation and assimilation of Native Americans on reservations (believing that doing so would protect them from conflict with white settlers), supported the near extinction of buffalo herds to compel the Natives to move to reservations, and opposed civil service reform, leading to Grant firing him in 1875. He returned to Ohio to practice law and raise livestock, and he died in Mount Vernon in 1896 at the age of 87.