 Martin Delany describes him as the owner of a "fashionable merchant tailor shop" together with his brother, Thomas, catering to upper class gentlemen and businessmen in Philadelphia, while Henry M. Minton characterizes him as "the most prominent" of 15 tailors in the city.Bowers was a member of several literary societies.He was one of the signatories of the constitution of the Philadelphia Library Company of Colored Persons, instituted on January 1, 1833.