After serving during the early 1860s as Wisconsin's Secretary of State, this Whig-turned-Republican Party politician became the seventh Governor of Wisconsin. After only three months in office, he drowned in the Tennessee River while trying to board a traveling steamboat from a stationary, smaller boat. After working for a time as a teacher, he began editing a Whig publication called the Southport American. As a member of the newly-formed Republican Party, he served in the Wisconsin State Senate in the mid 1850s.
