He had suffered from "nervous prostration" after the war, which had caused Dickson to leave politics and the law at age 39. He was a semi-invalid for 23 years, during which he "despaired at the corruption and machine politics which increasingly characterized his party during the Gilded Age of late nineteenth century America." He wrote about black suffrage, reconstruction, civil service reform, and other topics often under the initials W.M.D. Dickson wrote a memoir entitled "Lincoln at Cincinnati".