Thomas Peters
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Thomas Peters was a slave who had been taken from his home in present-day Nigeria in 1760. William Campbell, an immigrant from Scotland who had settled in Wilmington, North Carolina, bought Peters. The economy in this colonial region centered on products made from timber—tar and pitch, turpentine, planking and masts used to build ships. Three-fifths of the Wilmington population were slaves who as carpenters, stevedores, sawyers, and laborers in the timber industry. Peters worked as a millwright.
According to Gary Nash, the historian who has traced the story of Thomas Peters, by the 1770s,
"Pamphleteers all over the colonies were crying out against British oppression, British tyranny, British plans to "enslave" the Americans. Such rhetoric, though designed for white consumption, often reached the ears of black Americans whose own oppression represented a stark contradiction of the principles that their white masters were enunciating in their protests against the mother country. Peters' own master, William Campbell, had become a leading member of Wilmington's Sons of Liberty in 1770; thus Peters witnessed his own master's personal involvement in a rebellion to secure for himself and his posterity those natural rights which were called inalienable. If inspiration for the struggle for freedom was needed, Peters could have found it in the household of his own slave master."
When the British gained control of the Wilmington area, Peters, “seized the moment, broke the law of North Carolina, redefined himself as a man instead of a piece of William Campbell's property, and made good his escape.” The British organized runaway slaves, including Peters, into a company called the Black Guides and Pioneers. Peters served with the Pioneers for the remainder of the war. He was wounded twice and promoted to sergeant.
Peters experiences during the American Revolution, says Nash,
“places him historically among the thousands of American slaves who took advantage of wartime disruption to obtain their freedom in any way they could. Sometimes they joined the American army, often serving in place of whites who gladly gave black men freedom in order not to risk life and limb for the cause. Sometimes they served with their masters on the battlefield and hoped for the reward of freedom at the war's end. Sometimes they tried to burst the shackles of slavery by fleeing the war altogether and seeking refuge among the trans-Allegheny Indian tribes. But most frequently freedom was sought by joining the British whenever their regiments were close enough to reach. Unlike the dependent, childlike Sambos that some historians have described, black Americans took up arms, as far as we can calculate, in as great a proportion to their numbers as did white Americans. Well they might, for while white revolutionaries were fighting to protect liberties long enjoyed, black rebels were fighting to gain liberties long denied. Perhaps only twenty percent of these American slaves gained their freedom and survived the war, and many of them faced years of travail and even reenslavement thereafter. But the Revolution provided them with the opportunity to stage the first large-scale rebellion of American slaves---a rebellion, in fact, that was never duplicated during the remainder of the slave era."
With the British defeat in 1781, Peters moved with other former slaves to Nova Scotia and, finally, returned to Africa to settle in Sierra Leone.
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Source:
Gary B. Nash, “Thomas Peters: Millwright and Deliverer,” at The American Revolution: National Discussions of Our Revolutionary Origins, a web site created by H-Net, Humanities & Social Sciences OnLine, http://revolution.h-net.msu.edu/ |
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