Thomas Peters (revolutionary)
Thomas Peters, born Thomas Potters (1738–25th June 1792), was a Black Pioneers warrior who fought for the British in the American Revolutionary War. He was a Black Loyalist who was resettled in Nova Scotia, where he became a politician and one of the "founding fathers" of the West African nation of Sierra Leone. Peters was one of a group of notable and influential black Canadians who lobbied the Crown to fulfil its commitment to land concessions in Nova Scotia. Later, in the late eighteenth century, they recruited African-American residents in Nova Scotia for the colonization of Sierra Leone.[1]
History
changeThomas Peters was born in West Africa into a wealthy family in Egba group of Yoruba tribe in Nigeria.[2][3] [4]
According to the Dictionary of Canadian Biography:
Legend has given Thomas Peters a noble birth in West Africa, whence he was supposedly kidnapped as a young man and brought as a slave to the American colonies. The earliest documentary evidence places him in 1776 as the 38-year-old slave of William Campbell in Wilmington, North Carolina. In that year, encouraged by the proclamation issued by Governor Lord Dunmore of Virginia in 1775 promising freedom to rebel-owned slaves who joined the loyalist forces, Peters fled Campbell’s plantation and enlisted in the Black Pioneers in New York. In 1779, in response to a new invitation to rebel-owned slaves to place themselves under British protection whether they wished to bear arms for the crown or not, a 26-year-old woman named Sally from Charleston, South Carolina, appeared in a British camp, and she too joined the Black Pioneers. In that service she met Peters, who by 1779 had been promoted sergeant, and they were married. [5]
Enslavement
changeThomas Peters was taken by slave traders at age twenty-seven as a slave to French Louisiana on the Henri Quatre in the year 1760. Thomas was sold to a French planter upon his arrival in North America, most likely in New Orleans. At some points, Peters attempted three escapes before being sold to an English or Scotsman in one of the southern colonies, called William Campbell. Campbell was most likely an immigrant Scotsman who settled on the Cape Fear River in Wilmington, North Carolina.[6]
References
change- ↑ "Biography – PETERS, THOMAS – Volume IV (1771-1800) – Dictionary of Canadian Biography". www.biographi.ca. Retrieved 2023-10-02.
- ↑ Graft-Johnson, John Coleman De (1986). African Glory: The Story of Vanished Negro Civilizations. Black Classic Press. ISBN 978-0-933121-03-4.
- ↑ Brown, Stewart Jay; Tackett, Timothy (2006-12-07). The Cambridge History of Christianity: Volume 7, Enlightenment, Reawakening and Revolution 1660-1815. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-81605-2.
- ↑ https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new-brunswick/black-loyalist-thomas-peters-1.3533029
- ↑ James W. St G. Walker. "PETERS, THOMAS". Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 4. University of Toronto. Retrieved 2019-02-27.
- ↑ https://books.google.com/books?id=VLG0mqIZ55IC&pg=PA421
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