He moved to San Francisco in 1860, and was elected to the United States Congress as a Democrat, Representing California's First Congressional District in 1866 and re-elected 1868.

In 1876, responding to pro-settler verdicts by local juries, he suspended Colfax County's judicial powers.

Axtell also dispatched a company of U.S. Army soldiers to arrest settler leader Clay Allison and three of his allies.

[5] In Lincoln County, a business rivalry grew into a cycle of revenge killings between partisans of "The House" owned by James Dolan (supported by the Jesse Evans Gang) and the Lincoln County Regulators supporting competing businesses run by John Tunstall and Alexander McSween.

This decision may have been influenced by the Attorney General of the New Mexico Territory, Thomas Catron, who held a mortgage on Dolan's property.

[6] Accusations of corruption and misconduct led Secretary of the Interior Carl Schurz (R) to initiate an investigation into Axtell's activities as governor.

[citation needed] Based on Angell's investigation, Secretary Schurz suspended the Governor on September 4, 1878.

[7] President Rutherford B. Hayes (R) then appointed General Lew Wallace to replace Axtell later that year.

On the bench he endeavored at all times to secure what he saw fit to designate as "substantial justice" for all litigants, and judicial precedents which interfered with the main object of trials in his court, or with equity from his standpoint, were ruthlessly cast aside.

Seeing that the case was going against the man unless he could obtain legal counsel, Judge Axtell descended from the bench and began conducting the cross-examination with the remark: "It takes thirteen men to steal a poor boy's farm in New Mexico."