Mr. Gowen is in St. Helena. He is an able and brilliant man and in some respects a veritable Napoleon, but he is no railroad manager.... The trouble with Mr. Gowen is that he wants to be fighting all the time. When he was after the Molly Maguires he was in his element, but as a railroad manager he is a failure. This syndicate proposed its reorganization plan to the sitting receivers, who decided to cooperate towards putting it into effect. Gowen immediately attempted to put together his own syndicate, but this failed to bear sufficient fruit. Through a series of maneuverings with associates and erstwhile Gowen friends and allies, as well as minor changes to its original proposal, Morgan's group was able to win Gowen over — even to the provision requiring that he step down, once and for all, as president of the Reading Railroad. His resignation was effective September 17, 1886. Life after the railroad Gowen never completely gave up the practice of law. A notable instance was during the run up to the Reading's May 1880 bankruptcy: in March Gowen was in Harrisburg prosecuting bribery cases on behalf of the state of Pennsylvania, growing out of the state's Railroad Riots Act investigations, and from Gowen's perspective an extension of his ongoing legal wranglings against the allied activities of the Pennsylvania Railroad and Standard Oil. Gowen was president of the Reading Railroad and also had a history of involvement in civic matters. He had been a Democratic representative to the state constitutional convention in 1873 and had been a board of governors member of the Philadelphia Reform Club. As well, also in the run up to the railroad's 1880 bankruptcy, he had lent his name in support of one side of a fight for control of the state Democratic convention. At another point during his presidency his name was rumored as a possible Democratic candidate for Pennsylvania governor. In his forced retirement from the active affairs of the Reading, Gowen spent time composing limericks and also translating German poetry. Involvement with literature was not new to him — recall his founding role in the Pottsville Literary Society decades before; and he was well versed enough in the stage to include lengthy descriptions of two plays in his speech at one of the Molly Maguire trials. Despite the enforced peace introduced by J.P. Morgan among formerly cutthroat competing