Thomas Peters (also known as Thomas Potters) (June 25, 1738 in Nigeria - 1792 in Freetown, Sierra Leone) was one of the Black Loyalist Founding Fathers of Sierra Leone. Peters, along with David George, Moses Wilkinson, Cato Perkins, and Joseph Leonard, were influential blacks who recruited African settlers in Nova Scotia for colonization of Sierra Leone. Peters himself was a former African-American slave who fled North Carolina with the British during the American Revolutionary War and later ended up as a leader in Freetown. Thomas Peters has been called the first African-American hero. Peters, like Elijah Johnson and Joseph Jenkins Roberts of Liberia, is considered the African-American founding father of a nation.