[4] Later that year,[4] Dixon traveled west to Wisconsin and settled in Portage, in Columbia County, where he started a legal practice.

[6] In the year after his term as district attorney expired, Dixon earned wide recognition for his prosecution of John Baptiste DuBay in his murder trial.

[7] DuBay's attorneys were both esteemed lawyers and prominent politicians—Moses M. Strong had been Speaker of the Wisconsin Assembly, and had famously secured the acquittal of James Russell Vineyard after he had killed a fellow representative on the floor of the territorial legislature; Harlow S. Orton had been an attorney for Governor Coles Bashford when he successfully challenged the results of the 1855 Wisconsin gubernatorial election.

The new governor, Alexander Randall, appointed Dixon to the seat, which had jurisdiction over Columbia, Dane, Jefferson, and Sauk counties.

[9] His dissent resulted in him losing the support of the Republican Party for the election in the Spring of 1860, when he was scheduled to run for a full term on the court.

Republicans instead supported A. Scott Sloan, who ran on an extreme state's rights platform against the federal slavery laws.

At the outbreak of the American Civil War, Dixon attempted to enter the military service but was dissuaded by Governor Randall, who said he could do more for the country from his position as chief justice than he could on a battlefield.

[1] He also faced another difficult election during the war, as Montgomery Morrison Cothren was nominated by the Democratic Party in 1863 on an anti-war platform.

However, the Constitution of Wisconsin prohibited Dixon from receiving the new salary until he started a new term, so he resigned in March 1867 and was immediately re-appointed by the governor.

That year, the Democrats nominated Charles Dunn, who had served as chief justice of the supreme court under the Wisconsin Territory government.

[1] He moved to Milwaukee, where he formed a partnership known as Dixon, Hooker, Wegg, & Noyes, which became one of the strongest law firms in the state in that era.

"[2][15] In 1875, as the United States Senate election in the Wisconsin Legislature was deadlocked over Republican opposition to their incumbent, Matthew H. Carpenter, Dixon was approached as a potential compromise candidate.

Their eldest son, Henry Woods Dixon, became a lawyer but died of a sudden heart attack at age 33 while sitting in a restaurant in 1888.

[16] Edward Luther Dixon also became an attorney and partnered with his father in his Colorado law firm, but died of a brain ailment in 1904 at the relatively young age of 39.