Bowman was born near Cedar Creek in Frederick County, the son of George Bowman and Mary Hite Bowman. His brother John Bowman was a frontier militia officer, and another brother Joseph Bowman was an officer in George Rogers Clark’s Illinois Regiment. Nothing is definitely known of Abraham Bowman’s education, but he probably worked for a local surveyor and may have intended to follow that profession. When Bowman was about seventeen he assisted his neighbors in repelling an attack from Indigenous peoples, and when Dunmore County was formed out of Frederick in the spring of 1772, he was appointed one of the new county’s first justices of the peace.
On January 10, 1775, Bowman was a founder of the Dunmore County Committee, organized to enforce the nonimportation association that the First Continental Congress had adopted. Shortly thereafter he traveled to Kentucky, where on June 5, 1775, agents of the Transylvania Company appointed him a conservator of the peace at the Boiling Springs community. Bowman returned to Dunmore County in the autumn, and when John Peter Gabriel Muhlenberg issued his call for volunteers from the lower Shenandoah Valley to form a regiment to fight for Virginia, Bowman was one of the first to respond. On January 12, 1776, the Virginia Convention of 1775–1776 appointed Muhlenberg colonel and Bowman lieutenant colonel of the 8th Regiment Virginia Infantry, also called the German Regiment because many of its first soldiers were of German birth or ancestry. Muhlenberg and Bowman took their qualifying oaths on April 3, 1776, and received commissions dated March 1.
The German Regiment was one of the most famous Virginia regiments in the Revolutionary War. General Charles Lee and other commanders complained of its soldiers’ unmilitary deportment during service in Tidewater Virginia in the spring of 1776 and en route to South Carolina early in the summer, but the regiment so distinguished itself during the defense of Charleston on June 28 that Lee singled it out for high praise. The Continental Congress voted in principle to take the regiment into the Continental Army on March 25, 1776, subsequently ruled that the unit would not be accepted until it was fully manned, and on August 13, 1776, reversed itself and admitted it into the Continental establishment dating from May 25.
After Muhlenberg’s appointment as brigadier general, Bowman was promoted to colonel on March 22, 1777, with his commission to date from January 30. He led the German Regiment in the Battles of Brandywine and Germantown in the autumn of 1777 and continued to serve until after the Battle of Monmouth in June 1778. Bowman returned to Virginia to recruit more soldiers, but, perhaps because recruitment funds had been exhausted, he did not return to the army.
Bowman moved to Kentucky in 1779 and settled near Lexington in what became Fayette County a year later. During the summer of 1782 he married Sarah Henry Bryan, the widow of John Bowman’s stepson. She had one son by her first husband, and the Bowmans had four sons and three daughters. Bowman had begun investing in land during the 1770s, on his own and in partnership with his brothers John Bowman and Joseph Bowman, and he amassed several thousand acres and prospered as a planter. Bowman became a Fayette County justice of the peace on July 19, 1786, and in 1792 served as an elector for the new Senate of Kentucky. He lived to be old and respected, and as one of the most prominent Revolutionary War veterans in central Kentucky he hosted the Marquis de Lafayette when the French general visited Lexington in May 1825. Abraham Bowman died at his home in Fayette County, Kentucky, on November 9, 1837.
