nation's newspapers, the origin of Milwaukee's public library system. Fillmore employed a succession of editors, including Jason Downer, later a Wisconsin Supreme Court justice, and Increase A. Lapham, a Midwestern naturalist who later helped establish the National Weather Service. After running through six editors in eight years, Fillmore sought a more stable editorial foundation and went east to confer with Thurlow Weed, editor of the Albany Evening Journal and powerful Whig political boss of New York. Weed recommended his associate editor and protégé, Rufus King. King was a native of New York City, a graduate of West Point, a brevet lieutenant, the son of the president of Columbia College and the grandson of U.S. Constitution signer Rufus King. In June 1845 King came to Milwaukee and became the Sentinels editor three months later. The paper provided thorough coverage of Wisconsin's constitutional convention, held in Madison in 1846. When the adopted constitution fell short of Whig expectations, the Sentinel was instrumental in encouraging its rejection by territorial voters on April 6, 1847. The Sentinel launched a German-language paper, Der Volksfreund, to bring the city's large population of German immigrants to the Whig cause. Gen. King himself was a delegate to Wisconsin's second constitutional convention. He was also appointed head of the Milwaukee militia and sat on the University of Wisconsin's board of regents, as well as being the first superintendent of Milwaukee public schools. In the wake of the Panic of 1857 King sold the paper to T.D. Jermain and H.H. Brightman, but remained editor, covering the state legislative sessions of 1859–1861 himself. In 1848, the Sentinel praised the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, a treaty that ended the Mexican–American War, commenting: "Peace upon almost any terms will be joyfully welcomed by the American People. They have long since tired of the war." The Sentinel prospered during the Civil War, sometimes printing five editions of the paper in a day. Though much of the war news was copied from Chicago papers, the Sentinel did dispatch a war correspondent for over half a year. The war also resulted in a shortage of skilled printers, so in 1863 the Sentinel began hiring and training "female compositors" to typeset the paper, albeit in another building away from the men. This resulted in members of the Milwaukee Typographical Union leaving their jobs, but the war had already depleted their ranks to such a degree that the