Prior to the War of 1812, the Shawnee chief Tecumseh tried with his brother Tenskwatawa, a religious leader known as the Prophet, to revivify a confederacy of Indian peoples and rebuild it strong enough to halt the rapid expansion into their lands of American settlers, prevent additional lands from being sold to whites, and preserve Indian cultures from European influence. A number of such confederacies had been formed previously but had failed to hold together. Tecumseh ultimately allied with the British in their war against the U.S. and died in battle on October 5, 1813 at the Thames River in present-day Kent County, Ontario, fighting American soldiers who had invaded Canada. His confederation was the final one that posed a serious threat to American westward expansion.

Tecumseh was highly respected by many of the white men who fought with him and against him. Tecumseh's ally, British general Isaac Brock, stated in 1812 that Tecumseh "has the admiration of everyone who conversed with him." Major John Richardson, who became Canada's first novelist, called him "a savage such as civilization herself might not blush to acknowledge as her child." Michigan Territory Governor Lewis Cass, who led militia troops against Tecumseh, praised him as "remarkable in the highest degree" and characterized his oratory as "the utterance of a great mind roused by the strongest motives of which human nature is susceptible; and developing a power and a labor of reason, which commanded the admiration of the civilized, as justly as the confidence and pride of the savage." In journalistic accounts, Tecumseh was represented as an Indian Napoleon, Hannibal, and Alexander. Towns in Michigan, Nebraska, Kansas, Missouri, Indiana, Alabama, Oklahoma, and Ontario today bear his name.

Historians have attempted to account for the great admiration that whites had for Tecumseh. R. David Edmunds suggested that his "attempts at political and military unification seemed logical to both the British and the Americans, for it was what they would have done in his place." In addition, Edmunds proposed, "More than any other prominent Indian, Tecumseh exemplified the European or American concept of the 'noble savage,'" pointing specifically to his "kindness toward prisoners [that] particularly appealed to Americans." John Sugden listed qualities that Americans admired in Tecumseh: "courage, fortitude, ambition, generosity, humanity, eloquence, military skill, leadership . . . Above all, patriotism and a love of liberty." Richard White has noted the ironic nature of this admiration: "Tecumseh, the paradoxical nativist who had resisted the Americans, became the Indian who was virtually white."

Charles R. Sherman, the father of the future general, who settled in the Ohio Valley in 1811 and later became an Ohio State Supreme Court justice, was among the many admirers of Tecumseh. Lancaster, Ohio, where the general was born in 1820, is less than 40 miles northeast from the old Shawnee town of Chillicothe—just north of the present-day town of the same name— where historians believe that Tecumseh likely had been born some 55 years earlier. The Rev. P. C. Headley, in an 1865 biography of Sherman, one of at least five books about the general published since his military campaign of the previous year, quoted an unidentified person claiming to be from the area of the general's birthplace, who had written to Headley that Tecumseh "was for a long time kept in rather fond remembrance in this immediate vicinity, by those who were engaged in that conflict . . . because they knew that several times he prevented the shedding of innocent blood." The writer went on to relate that the desire of Sherman's father "to have one son educated for military life, led him to choose Tecumseh for the boy, he being born not long after the death of that chieftain."

Some 20 years later, Sherman himself, in the second edition of his memoirs—he had neglected to discuss his early life in the first edition— wrote that the War of 1812 "caused great alarm and distress in all Ohio." He stated, "Nearly every man had to be somewhat of a soldier, but I think my father was only a commissary; still, he seems to have caught a fancy for the great chief of the Shawnees, 'Tecumseh.'" When Sherman's older brother James was born, the general related, his father "insisted on engrafting the Indian name 'Tecumseh' on the usual family list." Sherman's mother, who had named her first son after a brother of hers, prevailed, however, in her desire to name her second son after a second brother of hers. By the time of his own birth, Sherman continued, "mother having no more brothers, my father succeeded in his original purpose, and named me William Tecumseh." As a boy, Sherman was called "Cump" by family members.

In 1872, William J. Reese, Sherman's brother-in-law, wrote that the choice of an Indian name did cause some consternation in the community. "Judge Sherman was remonstrated with, half in play and half in earnest, against perpetuating in his family this savage Indian name," Reese remembered. "He only replied, but it was with seriousness, 'Tecumseh was a great warrior' and the affair of the name was settled."

The oft-repeated use of the term "savage" in describing Tecumseh and Indians in general points to deeply rooted ideological ways of understanding cultural difference that whites at the time had even with respect to individuals such as Tecumseh, whom they clearly admired. Historian Robert F. Berkhofer has traced "persisting fundamental images and themes" of European understandings of Indians, noting the practice of "conceiving of Indians in terms of their deficiencies according to White ideals rather than in terms of their own various cultures." Whites, Berkhofer contended, often used "counterimages of themselves to describe Indians and the counterimages of Indians to describe themselves." The strength of such persistent dichotomies between savage Indians and civilized whites becomes even more noticeable in light of the irony that in the aftermath of the battle during which Tecumseh died, his corpse was scalped and pieces of skin were removed by American soldiers for souvenir strips and razor strops. Sudgen has written that "Henry Clay was said to have exhibited one in Washington the following winter."

You have identified a person who I'd like to know more about myself! History is always about solving puzzles and mysteries, and I have looked closely at the clues your question provides: African ancestry, slave status, literacy, sympathy with the Continental Army during the Revolution, and connections to a Native American community. But a cursory search through the historical literature hasn't turned up one individual with this particular life story. Several different individuals have elements of it, however.

One such person is Joseph Louis Cook, the son of an African-American father and an Abenaki mother who had both been taken captive by the Iroquois. Cook himself was raised in the Mohawk community and played a prominent role fighting on behalf of the Continental Army during the American Revolution. The Mohawk are a matrilineal people (they trace their kinship and identity through their mothers), and so Cook would have likely identified himself as a member of the Iroqouis confederacy; he married a Mohawk woman and served as a diplomatic chief of the Oneida.

Another individual was Pierre Bonga, whose parents had been enslaved and then freed by a British officer on Mackinack Island in Michigan. Pierre went on to work in the fur trade in what became Minnesota and married an Ojibwe woman; at least one of their children, George, also worked in the fur trade and is known as the first African-American born in Minnesota. Unlike the Mohawk, the Ojibwe are patrilineal, tracing their tribal identity through their fathers, so it seems likely that George would have thought of himself as African-American rather than Ojibwe.

Another prominent person in this time period was Crispus Attucks, the first person killed in the Boston Massacre. His father had been enslaved and his mother was a Natick Indian; Attucks himself was a slave who escaped and became very active in the Revolutionary movement in Boston. Whereas the men mentioned above were probably born free, Attucks was likely born a slave and that status may have influenced his identification as an African-American. Certainly he is remembered as one of our African-American heros of the American Revolution, and his Native ancestry is underemphasized.

Natick Indians spoke a language from the Algonquin language family and likely possessed cultural futures similar to other Northeastern Algonquin peoples, including patrilineal kinship. But the Native world of the Northeast was in such flux at this moment in history that it is difficult to say for certain how kinship practices influenced the identity of men like Crispus Attucks. I speak of these tribal communities in the past tense, but of course they still exist today and practice many of the same cultural traditions.

The reference you make to the individual's literacy reminds me of Frederick Douglass's experience as a slave in Baltimore, where his master's wife taught him to read and write. Douglass remarked that American slaves thought themselves the most forsaken of God's children, until they met the American Indian. The history of African-Native interactions in North America goes back to the 1526 expedition of Lucas Vasquez de Allyon, a Spanish soldier who established a colony at the mouth of the Peedee River in South Carolina. Four months later, Allyon died and the colony fell apart; the 100 enslaved Africans that Allyon brought with him were free to join local Native communities.

When we consider this long history, then—one that dates back to the very invasion of the Americas—we have to recognize that ideas about racial and cultural identity have changed significantly over time. As i indicated above, these men that we remember as African-American today may not have thought of themselves that way. Native peoples were in power long enough through the 18th century to exert considerable influence over how their communities functioned and how they determined belonging. So even though Frederick Douglass's estimation of Native-African relations may have rung true in the nineteenth century (after Native nations had been removed from the Southeast and their lands taken from them in Northeast), it was unlikely that all Native people thought their Creator had forsaken them in the 18th century.

Similarly, African-American literature flourished in the 18th century, as freed slaves wrote their life histories. Dozens of these tracts have survived, emerging from a time in our history when whites did not universally see slave literacy as a threat to the social order. I suspect if the story you seek exists in one person, it is to be found in this body of slave narratives. Not coincidentally, the Removal and dispossession of Indians occurred around the same time as increased repression of African-Americans, both free and enslaved, in the 1830s.

What changed between the relative autonomy enjoyed by Native and African Americans in the 18th century and the oppression and dispossession they experienced in the 19th century? The American Revolution. This was an event driven by a desire for freedom from the political authority of Great Britain and a desire to control Indian lands that Britain had largely prevented American colonists from settling. Despite these twin aims, men like Joseph Louis Cook (later known as Colonel Louis) fought for the Americans for their own strategic reasons—not to advance American interests, but to advance what he perceived as Iroquois interests. The ideal of freedom promoted by the Founding Fathers did not extend to anyone but free white males, but of course men like Crispus Attucks and many others fought to be included in this vision.

It was a tough road and remained so—after the colonists finally eliminated the British presence in the War of 1812, African Americans and Native Americans were left to deal with a regime that had no interest in their freedom or their preservation as autonomous people. The slave-led Haitian Revolution and slave revolts in the new United States drove various states, particularly in the South, to crack down on what freedoms enslaved people enjoyed, while at the same time conspiring with the federal government to dispossess Indians of their lands through Removal. The United States only exercised a vague authority over places like Minnesota and Michigan (then known as the Northwest Territory), where the Bonga family settled. It's possible that the individual you seek indeed settled in one of these loosely-controlled areas after learning that the opportunity he sought was not available in the states. For example, even though he fought with the Americans and presumably should have found a home in the United States, Cook actually went to Canada with a group of Mohawks after the Revolutionary War.

Your question strikes at the heart of an American history that has been largely ignored, that of the productive relationships between Indians and African Americans. While there is some tension between certain members of these groups today, as seen in the controversy over the status of the Cherokee Freedmen, I believe it is safe to say that such tensions are a product of how the United States expanded in the 19th century, not inherent racism or animosity between them.