Sir Banastre Tarleton, 1st Baronet, GCB (August 21, 1754 – January 15, 1833) is a British soldier and politician.

Tarleton is eventually ranked as a general years after his service in the colonies during the American Revolutionary War, and afterward does not lead troops into battle.

Banastre Tarleton is known for his British military service in the American War of Independence, which starts when Tarleton is twenty-one.

As a military commander he is the subject of a rebel American campaign which claims that Tarleton's British Legion had massacred surrendering Continental Army troops at the Battle of Waxhaws, South Carolina, in 1780.

In the nineteenth century these killings will become known in American history as the "Waxhaws Massacre".

In the biography The Green Dragoon: The Lives of Banastre Tarleton and Mary Robinson (1957), by Robert D. Bass, Tarleton is identified as the 'Bloody Ban', the 'Butcher', and 'The Green Dragoon'.

In American popular culture these nicknames were the result of Colonel Tarleton's reputation for brutality during the War of Independence, while the colonial Loyalists and the British hailed and praised Tarleton as an outstanding leader of light cavalry, and as an officer of great tactical prowess and soldierly resolve, especially against superior numbers of enemy.

Tarleton's cavalrymen are called 'Tarleton's Raiders'.

His green uniform is the standard uniform of the British Legion, a provincial unit organized in New York, in 1778.

After returning to Great Britain in 1781 at the age of twent-seven, Tarleton is elected a Member of Parliament for Liverpool and return sto office in the early nineteenth century.

As such, Tarleton becomes a prominent Whig politician despite his young man's reputation as a roué.

Given the importance of the slave trade to the British shipping industry in Liverpool, Tarleton strongly supports slavery as an economic means.