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PREFATORY NOTE
TO PAINE’S FIRST ESSAY
This essay is here for the first time printed since its original appearance in the Postscript to the Pennsylvania Journal and the Weekly Advertiser, Philadelphia, March 8, 1775. Dr. Benjamin Rush, who was much impressed by the essay, says, “He [Paine] told me the essay to which I alluded was the first thing he had ever published in his life.” Dr. Rush, writing thirty-four years after the interview, and in extreme age, must have reported Paine’s remark inexactly, for several articles by Paine were published a little earlier in 1775. But there are indications that this antislavery essay was written at the close of 1774, immediately after Paine’s arrival in America (November 30). It was therefore the first essay he wrote for publication, though its appearance was delayed by the editor. Probably there was hesitation about publishing it at all. It was given a place in the Postscript. In the same issue “a stout healthy young negro man” is offered for sale, for whom those interested may “enquire of the Printers.” Slavery existed in all of the colonies,—there were nearly 6,000 slaves in Pennsylvania—nor had any one proposed immediate abolition of the system in America.
Attention was called to the Slave Trade by an anonymous pamphlet, small and cheap, entitled “A Short Account of that Part of Africa inhabited by the Negroes, etc.” This was published in Philadelphia, the second edition (probably the first also) dated 1762. In 1767 the Quaker Anthony Benezet wrote “A Caution and Warning to Great Britain
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