Thomas Peters (revolutionary)

Thomas Peters, born Thomas Potters (1738 – 25 June 1792) was a veteran of the Black Pioneers, fighting for the British in the American Revolutionary War. A Black Loyalist, he was resettled in Nova Scotia, where he became a politician and one of the "Founding Fathers" of the nation of Sierra Leone in West Africa. Peters was among a group of influential Black Canadians who pressed the Crown to fulfill its commitment for land grants in Nova Scotia. Later they recruited African-American settlers in Nova Scotia for the colonisation of Sierra Leone in the late eighteenth century.

Enslaved in the Province of North Carolina, Peters escaped and joined British forces during the American Revolutionary War. He served as a Black Loyalist in the Black Company of Pioneers in New York and was evacuated with British forces and many other former slaves at the end of the war. Thomas Peters has been called the "first African-American hero". Like Elijah Johnson and Joseph Jenkins Roberts of Liberia, Peters is considered the African-American founding father of a nation, in this case, Sierra Leone.