Paine attacked slavery as hypocrisy just months before writing Common Sense.

Evidence

In a chance encounter that gave rise to Common Sense, Paine met Philadelphia physician and patriot leader Benjamin Rush in March 1775. Two years earlier, Rush published a scathing attack on the American practice of importing and enslaving Africans—not the first such pamphlet but an important one. Paine added his voice to the small but growing chorus of colonists speaking out against slavery with a March 8 newspaper essay that assailed Americans for demanding their own liberty while denying it to others. “With what consistency, or decency,” he asked, do “they complain so loudly of attempts to enslave them, while they hold so many hundred thousands in slavery; and annually enslave many thousands more?” — Edward J. Larson, Declaring Independence, 62

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the wider founding tension between liberty rhetoric and chattel slavery that shapes later constitutional debates. — connects to: Paine’s virtue-versus-corruption framing predated Common Sense by a year