Bicknell, Thomas W. “First Organized Struggle and Victory of the Civil War at Kansas City…1856”  Typed Manuscript , with some pencil corrections, unsigned, but with Bicknell’s signature and title repeated on original envelope in which the manuscript was sent to Providence Daily Journal. 10pp.,probably written ca. 1908 when Bicknell gave a statement of his Kansas memories to a John Brown biographer.

This first part of four projected installments of Bicknell’s memories of  joining two carloads of young men “from the Northern States” who trekked to the Kansas Territory in June 1856, “to assist in making that territory a free state” –  two months before John Brown the pitched battle between and John Brown and his sons and followers and an army of 400 pro-slavery men who had marched into Kansas. The other parts of Bicknell’s projected memoir, as outlined on the last page of this manuscript: An “account of the Border Ruffians” led by David R. Atchison who captured Bicknell and his comrades on the Missouri River, “our attempt to escape and our detention at St. Joe, Mo.” And the “thrilling adventures of our prison life, our return, down the River” and the South Carolina Sharp Shooters and Virginia Riflemen” who set them adrift. Just 22 when he had these youthful adventures as an abolitionist crusader, went on to become a nationally-acclaimed American educator, first as Rhode Island Commissioner of Public Schools after the Civil War, advocating for racial integration and women’s educational equality6, later as President of the National Education Association.  He was also an editor and publisher and “one of the outstanding historians of Rhode island during the first half of the 20th century”, author of a shelf of books on the state’s history. But as Bicknell never wrote a full-length autobiography, this possibly-unpublished manuscript, well-written a half-century after his abolitionist trek, is a significant historical source about his early life and about the violent struggle of “bleeding” Kansas five years before Fort Sumter.