Spain was not a bystander to the American Revolutionary War, although that fact is rarely mentioned in cursory historical surveys. Spain's motivation to help the American colonists was driven by a desire to regain the land it had lost to Britain and, with other European powers, make incremental gains against British possessions in other parts of the world. Although some dreamers in Spain perhaps envisioned its eventual possession of the entire New World, I have found no evidence that such an idea guided its assistance to the American colonists.

France and Spain were at that time both under Bourbon kings, Louis XVI and Carlos III, respectively, whose American possessions had been significantly reduced by the 1763 Treaty of Paris that ended the Seven Years' (the French and Indian) War. At the beginning of the American War of Independence, American commissioners were sent to Europe by the Continental Congress to seek support for their cause. John Jay, American representative in Spain, found success. Americans promised both France and Spain the restoration of much of the land they had lost to the British in America. In April 1779, Spain committed to helping the Americans.

This help did not consist of Spanish troops to fight alongside Americans, but it was extensive nevertheless. The Spanish and French kings provided large loans and outright contributions of money to the Americans. Spain laundered this money, as we would say today, through a fictitious private trading company, Roderique Hortalez and Company, operating out of the Lesser Antilles, which sent both money and war material directly to the Americans. The money helped support the Americans' new currency, the Continental, and also made it possible for the Americans to bring in foreign military officers, such as Augustus von Steuben, Casimir Pulaski, and Thaddeus Kosciuszko, to fight for them.

Spain began a military campaign of its own against the British in Florida and Louisiana. From 1779 through 1782, the Spanish Governor of Louisiana, Don Bernardo de Gàlvez, conducted a series of military actions against the British to retake forts that Spain had earlier lost to the British, succeeding in the Mississippi River Valley, and at Baton Rouge, Natchez, Mobile, and Pensacola. In 1782, Spain also succeeded in wresting back the Bahamas from the British.

A very substantial form of Spain's support for the Americans involved a strategy of joining Britain's other European competitors in tying up British naval resources by engaging them elsewhere than in Britain's American colonies. Spain did this, for example, against Gibraltar and Minorca, and together with France sent a fleet into the English Channel to menace the British coast and tie up more British ships. Most of the European maritime powers, including Spain, united against Britain's effort to interrupt their trade with America. With both France and Spain (and Holland) indirectly in the fray, Britain's navy was outmatched and could not effectively concentrate its military force in America. Spanish ships joined with French ships in the naval blockade of the British army at Yorktown in 1781, preventing General Cornwallis's resupply by the British navy, resulting in his surrender.

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.