still retained financial interest in the daily. He also partnered with Harrison Reed (1859–1861), a former Milwaukee Sentinel editor who later became a carpetbag governor of Florida during Reconstruction. During Atwood's 41-year tenure as publisher, he was a state assemblyman (1861), an internal revenue assessor (1862–1866), a Madison mayor (1868–1869) and a U.S. representative to Congress (1870), all the while publishing the Wisconsin State Journal until his death in 1889. As mayor, Atwood sought to develop manufacturing in Madison, a position he could then applaud in his own paper. Becoming a Republican organ In the early 1850s Atwood was aided by Horace Rublee, who had left the University of Wisconsin to be the legislative reporter for the Democratic Madison Argus. In 1853 he was associate editor of the Journal and the next year Atwood's business partner. Rublee was well positioned to participate in the new state politics that emerged in response to the Kansas–Nebraska Act. As early as January 1854 the newspaper called for a mass convention of anti-slavery citizens to meet in Madison. After events such as slave Joshua Glover's liberation in Milwaukee and the birth of the Republican Party on March 20, 1854 in Ripon, WI intervened, the convention that founded the Wisconsin Republican Party was held at the capitol on July 13 with Rublee acting as party secretary and Atwood serving on the resolutions committee. Rublee later became the chairman of the state Republican Party from 1859–1869. In 1860 he extended an unsuccessful invitation to Abraham Lincoln to speak at the party convention in Madison. Rublee allied himself with Madison mayor, postmaster and state patronage boss Elisha W. Keyes to run the "Madison Regency," the state's Republican machine. Rublee later broke with Keyes over the latter's support of President Andrew Johnson's vetoes of Freedman legislation. J.O. Culver purchased Rublee's interest in the paper in 1868 after Rublee was appointed minister to Switzerland by President Ulysses S. Grant. Rublee later became editor of the Milwaukee Sentinel, while Culver retired in December 1876. On July 10, 1861, the State Journal became the first newspaper to produce and sell ready-printed "patent insides," pages with Civil War news on one side but blank on the other, where the Baraboo Republic then printed its local news and advertising. Fostered by business manager John S. Hawks, this invention helped make many rural papers possible. During the 1870s Hawks expanded the State Journal's printing