He received his nation's highest award for valor, the U.S. Medal of Honor, for his display of gallantry during the Battle of the Wilderness on May 7, 1864, and afterward when he rejoined his regiment after having been wounded in action and held as a prisoner of war by Confederate States Army troops.

Lower became one of his nation's early responders to President Abraham Lincoln's call for volunteers to defend Washington, D.C. following the April 1861 fall of Fort Sumter to the Confederate States Army.

After three months of treatment for his injuries and subsequent convalescence at a Union Army hospital in New York, he returned to service with the 23rd Ohio at its headquarters at Camp White in West Virginia, but was quickly discharged on a surgeon's certificate and sent home to Pennsylvania when his superiors determined that he was still not fully recuperated.

Military records at the time described him as a 20-year-old farmer and native of Lawrence County, Pennsylvania who was 5' 9-1/2" tall with brown hair, gray eyes and a light complexion.

On June 13, while being transported by rail to the CSA's prisoner of war (POW) camp at Andersonville, Georgia, he jumped from the train, and escaped by making his way north to rejoin his regiment in Virginia.

[6][7] Following his honorable discharge from the military, Lower returned home to Pennsylvania where, sometime around 1869, he wed Sarah Edwards.

Superintendent of his county's Greenwood Cemetery, Lower also supported his family through the proceeds he made from his nursery business.