Franklin B. Gowen - Family, Education and Early Law Practice

Family, Education and Early Law Practice

James Gowen, described later in life as a "hot-tempered, domineering, old Irishman", emigrated from Ireland in 1811. He was listed as a "wine merchant" in property records regarding his 1834 purchase of 500 S. 5th Street in Philadelphia for $3,000. The property, which would become the Gowen household and store, consisted of a brick building with retail space on the ground floor and living quarters above it. He sold the property to Peter Woods for $4,500. in 1846. James Gowen served as director, and later as comptroller, of Philadelphia's public schools; and also as a director of the Bank of Pennsylvania. He was an ardent Jeffersonian Democrat.

Franklin Gowen was the fifth of ten children born to James Gowen and Mary Miller. Mary, 16 years James's junior, came from an early-immigrated German family: by tradition, her ancestors had been closely associated with Francis Daniel Pastorius, founder of Germantown (now part of Philadelphia), the first permanent German settlement in Pennsylvania. Prior to Franklin's birth in 1836, the Gowens moved from central Philadelphia to take up their residence in Mary's family home (James had bought out the interests of other family members) in Mt. Airy, just north of Germantown.

Young Franklin attended John Beck's Boys Academy, a boarding school in Lititz, Pennsylvania, from the ages of nine to thirteen. At that point, however, his formal schooling was curtailed. Instead he was apprenticed to a Lancaster dry goods merchant/coal dealer named Thomas Baumgardner, who held an interest in an iron furnace at Shamokin, Pennsylvania. Baumgardner liked and came to trust Franklin so that at age 19, Gowen found himself dispatched as clerk (i.e., bookkeeper) for that iron business. It was during this Shamokin period that Gowen met and courted his future wife, Esther Brisben (sometimes spelled Brisbane) of Sunbury.

After completing his apprenticeship, Gowen relocated to Pottsville, seat of Schuylkill County and the principal municipality in the southern portion of Pennsylvania's coal region. There he helped found the Pottsville Literary Society (at one of whose meetings he orated on "The Triumphs of Genius"), and entered into a partnership to operate a coal mine nearby. The mine failed (1859), leaving 23-year-old Gowen US$20,000 in debt. But undaunted Franklin Gowen—married now—studied law in the office of Benjamin Cumming, a Pottsville attorney. He was admitted to the bar in 1860.

He established his own practice, at the same time becoming active in the local Democratic party. Gowen served as Schuylkill County's elected D.A. (1862–64), though in that period, according to his generally sympathetic biographer, he was "doing too well with his private practice to have time to bother with prosecuting criminals." Others argue that Gowen would have diligently prosecuted numerous cases but for his suspects uniformly being furnished with alibis by fellow criminals, some of whom he brought to justice two decades later as Mollie Maguires. Whatever Gowen's personal attitude towards his official duties, the climate in Schuylkill County at the time was less than conducive to normal conduct of criminal investigations: First, at that time an elected county sheriff was the principal law enforcement officer. Second, and much to the point during Gowen's tenure, in July 1863, roughly the midpoint of his D.A. service and of the Civil War, a national conscription act was passed to bolster Union forces. The eruption of anti-draft riots in New York and other cities threatened to replicate in Schuylkill County as well. Threats and violence, including murder, occurred in several localities. Federal troops were deployed to the county to face down these fierce anti-draft feelings and disruptions, and finally conscription was effected under military force. When his own draft number came up that same year, Gowen—by then a father of three—was well-off enough to pay for a substitute, a common practice among those who could afford it.

When Gowen left public office in 1864 in favor of his more lucrative private law practice, among his clients was the Reading Railroad. His practice prospered, and he was finally able to satisfy the lingering judgments against him from the mine failure and to buy a fashionable home in Pottsville.

In 1865, his two young sons—James and Franklin Benjamin, Jr.—died from illness, leaving his daughter Ellen an only child: she was to have no other brothers or sisters. Also that spring Franklin's beloved younger brother, George, was killed in the final days of the Civil War. Col. George Gowen, who had originally moved to Schuylkill County to assist in his brother's mining enterprise, was regarded in Pottsville as a local hero, and the G.A.R. post and local militia company were given his name.

Much legal activity in Pottsville at the time had to do with clearing disputed land titles on behalf of both individuals and companies hoping to reap profits from the increasing anthracite trade. Beyond any work of this kind, Gowen was involved in representing the Reading against personal-injury negligence claims, some of which he argued successfully before the state Supreme Court, exonerating the Reading from liability.

Throughout his career, Franklin Gowen was renowned as an eloquent and persuasive speaker. A number of his orations were published and sold in pamphlet form. In an 1866 contract dispute—when Gowen was the Reading's local counsel in Pottsville—he won handily for the Reading, against its rival Pennsylvania Railroad, before the state Supreme Court, "bolster his points with legal citations, classical quotations, humorous stories, and even a toy train." Other notable instances included his closing argument as prosecutor in the 1876 murder trial of John Kehoe, vilified at the time as the "King of the Mollie Maguires," in which he portrayed the murders and other crimes attributed to Mollies as being an evil unparalleled in all human history, and as not locally motivated, but driven by orders from other places—Pittsburgh, New York—even other lands—England, Ireland, Scotland; and his three-hour argument in 1881 before a gathering of outraged stockholders of the bankrupt Reading Railroad, inside Philadelphia's Academy of Music, by which he turned open hostility into enthusiastic rounds of applause One twentieth-century commentator described Gowen's oratory skills thus:

"Even in cold print..., his speeches tend to unsettle the judgment."

By 1867, having impressed the Reading Railroad's management in Philadelphia with his legal exertions on their behalf, including the above mentioned state Supreme Court victory over the Pennsylvania Railroad, he was invited to Philadelphia to head the corporation's legal department. Leaving Pottsville behind, Gowen sold his home to George DeBenneville Keim, a fellow attorney and close personal friend, who was to figure significantly during Gowen's future presidency of the railroad.