 He served as a member of the Maryland House of Delegates from 1835 to 1837, served in the Maryland State Senate from 1837 to 1841, was delegate to the Whig National Convention at Harrisburg, Pennsylvania in 1840, and was State's attorney for Montgomery County, Maryland from 1844 to 1849.Bowie was elected as a Whig to the Thirty-first and Thirty-second Congresses, serving from March 4, 1849, to March 3, 1853.He was an unsuccessful Whig candidate for Governor of Maryland in 1853, and resumed the practice of his profession in Rockville.