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.

That Frederick Douglass was an abolitionist is beyond debate. Born a slave, he eventually escaped and became one of the most famous activists to work for emancipation. Whether working as a stump speaker or editing one abolitionist newspaper after another, Douglass expressed tremendous hope that the slave power would eventually fall. He once declared, “There is not a man beneath the canopy of heaven, that does not know that slavery is wrong for him.” That Douglass was radical in his anti-slavery speeches and newspaper editorials is somewhat debatable, and would depend on how one defines “radical.”

“Hereditary bondmen! Know ye not / Who would be free, themselves must strike the blow?”

Frederick Douglass was fond of quoting this line from Lord Byron as it summed up his political activism. This call to the enslaved to be their own liberators reflected a revolutionary urgency and fervor most would associate with radical measures. But compared with abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison, Douglass’s one-time mentor and fiery editor of the Liberator (whose masthead read “No Union with Slaveholders”), Frederick Douglass appears measured and sensible. For example, Douglass once wrote, “My position now is one of reform, not revolution. I would act for the abolition of slavery through the government—not over its ruins.”

In contrast, Garrison burned a copy of the Constitution in public, calling it “the most bloody and heaven-daring arrangement ever made by men for the continuance and protection of a system of the most atrocious villainy [sic] ever exhibited on earth.” Most famously, he pronounced the Constitution “a covenant with death,” “an agreement with hell,” and “refuge of lies.”

Even more extreme was John Brown, who tried to recruit Douglass for a raid on the federal armory in Harpers Ferry, VA, a doomed venture that exacerbated sectional tensions leading up to the 1860 presidential election. Brown believed the seizure of the armory would spur local slaves to rise up against their masters and spark a slave rebellion throughout the South. Douglass shunned the effort. As historian David Blight observed, “For Douglass, the question of violence was always more a tactical than a moral problem. He did not relish the prospect, but morally he believed the slaves had the right to rise up and slay their masters.” Compared with the lawlessness of Garrison and Brown and their disrespect for the Constitution, Douglass’s abolitionism looks less radical, if not tame.

Douglass sought to free the slaves within the confines of the Constitution. He thought only by keeping the slave states within the American Union could the federal government then be used to rid the nation of slavery. Douglass came to view the Constitution as a pro-liberty document, thus agreeing with Lincoln “the Great Emancipator” on the principal means of promoting freedom.

Lincoln understood the Founders to expect slavery to wither away in a generation or two by restricting its importation into the new nation (as early as 1808) and preventing its expansion into federal territory (see, the Northwest Ordinance of 1787). As historian James Oakes writes: “Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass agreed that there was no such thing as a constitutional right to own slaves. But for Lincoln the Constitution recognized the existence of slavery as a practical necessity, whereas for Douglass the absence of a right to own slaves obliged the federal government to overthrow slavery everywhere.”

In sum, what made Frederick Douglass an abolitionist was his experience with slavery firsthand: simply stated, he found it a poor fit for his humanity. He became a radical abolitionist, calling for the immediate abolition of slavery, because he came to view the U.S. Constitution as a pro-liberty document that could be interpreted to permit Congress to abolish slavery not only from federal territories but also in the states where it already existed. One might say his aims were radical, while his means, especially after the break from Garrison, were not radical insofar as they remained within the American constitutional context.

Most likely, the slave owner would let neighbors, friends, and extended family know that the slave was for sale and hope that a buyer could be found through this informal networking. They might also put up a notice in local stores, or take out an ad in the local newspapers. Or they might bring the slave to an informal local venue where people met together from time to time to buy and sell slaves. Another way to sell the slave would be to look for an itinerant slave dealer who was traveling through the area, buying a few slaves here and there and transporting them somewhere he thought he could find a market for them.

But what the owner could not do was sell their slave to someone in a neighboring slave state, unless that state had not yet prohibited the importation of slaves. As early as 1778, slave states, starting with Virginia and Maryland, made it illegal to import slaves from elsewhere. From that time on, residents of those states sold their “excess” slaves to newer slave states farther south, which still “needed” slaves.

An article entitled, “The Restriction of the Slave Trade in the South,” in the Washington, D.C.-based African-American newspaper, The National Era, of May 3, 1849, explained it this way:

The older slave States long since found it necessary to restrict the importation of slaves, with a view of keeping down the supply of slave-labor to the point of profitable employment. … The old slave States looked to the new as the market for their surplus slaves. When the new, under the pressure of an excess of slave labor, shall close their gates against the introduction of slaves, what then will be the condition of the South? Suppose the slave population pent up within its limits, all egress prohibited, what remedy, then, for the evils resulting from an excess of labor, preying upon capital, and over-production, reducing prices? The slave States would be compelled to choose depopulation or emancipation, the loss of the white population, or the freedom of their slaves. The maintenance of slavery would result in the exclusion of the poor whites, whites of the middling classes, and, finally, all but a few overgrown slaveholders, with their innumerable hordes of black dependents; and the ultimate result of this state of things can easily be foreseen.

This is the Future, which the pro-slavery men of the South would avert, by the policy of slavery extension. Slavery-restriction between the States must be accompanied by slavery-extension into the Territories - and when these Territories shall have been converted into States, prohibiting slavery, or, if tolerating slavery, prohibiting the slave trade, then, new territories must be sought to receive the refuse slave population, the inevitable excess of slave labor. In this way, generation after generation is to be cursed, and the whole continent southwardly, not now under our control, to be acquired by the force, fraud, or money of the General Government for the purpose of eternizing the most diabolical system of oppression God's earth has ever groaned under.

Well then, why didn't they just free the slave, which was sometimes done by deed or by will? There could be several obstacles.

The slave codes of nearly all the Southern states placed restraints on slave owners regarding their attempts at the “manumission” or freeing of their slaves. The justification for this restraint on an owner’s “property” was that the state had the right, as explained by lawyer Jacob Wheeler in 1837, “to protect society from even the benevolence of slave owners, in throwing upon the community a great number of stupid, ignorant, and vicious persons, to disturb its peace and endanger its permanency.” But it also had the effect of discouraging slave owners from simply turning out their slaves when they became a burden to them. Typically, an owner was not allowed to free a slave if the owner had an outstanding debt (to meet which, the slave could be sold and the proceeds applied to the debt).

It was also quite common for a state to require any slave owner who wished to free a slave to apply to the state legislature for permission to do so, and to give a reason for the application, such as the slave’s meritorious service, which is to say that it was actually the state that had the power to manumit slaves, not owners.

In addition, it was a typical part of the states’ slave codes that freed slaves had to leave the state, so that they would not “disturb its peace” by fostering discontent among the local slave population or by competing with local whites for work. If freed, the slave could actually be worse off in some respect, especially if he or she was older, ill, had very limited skills, or had no other place to go. If the owner had humane feelings and the slave had been part of their household, with relatives nearby, the owner might judge that they had a responsibility to care for him or her and not put the slave in the position of having to leave the state if freed.

If all attempts to sell a slave failed, someone might also have considered hiring him or her out for a set period of time, if that person could find someone, nearby or far away, who could give them employment. Frederick Douglass gave a good description of this sort of arrangement in his autobiography.