Peters, Thomas

PETERS, THOMAS (born Thomas Potters, 1738–25 June 1792), veteran of the Black Pioneers—a Black Loyalist military unit that fought for the British during the American Revolutionary War—and one of the founding fathers of Sierra Leone. Born in West Africa to the Egba people of the Yoruba tribe and kidnapped into slavery in Louisiana and then North Carolina, Peters escaped from his master’s flour mill in 1776 and joined the Black Pioneers, lured by the promise of freedom in exchange for his service against the nascent United States of America. Rising to the rank of sergeant, Peters distinguished himself in battle. After the war, the British honored their promise and evacuated Peters, along with several thousand additional former slaves, to Nova Scotia. There, Peters was among an influential group of Black Canadians who pressed the British Crown to fulfill its land grant commitments. He became a politician and, when neither the British nor the Canadian governments were able to provide sufficient land to the Black settlers, he helped convince the British to allow them to pioneer a new colony in what would be called Freetown, Sierra Leone. As a “founding father” of this new nation, he helped to recruit African American settlers in Nova Scotia for the colonization of Sierra Leone in 1792. He has been called the “first African American hero.” Although he died early in the colony’s history, his descendants can still be traced to members of the Krio people, a Creole ethnic group, who still live in and around Freetown.