to organize society. Slavery According to Christopher Hitchens, Paine was an strong critic of slavery and declared himself to be an abolitionist. As secretary to the Pennsylvania legislature, he helped draft legislation to outlaw Patriot involvement in the international slave trade. Paine's statement, "Man has no property in man", although used by him in Rights of Man to deny the right of any generation to bind future ones, has also been interpreted as an argument against slavery. In the book, Paine also describes his mission, among other things, as to "break the chains of slavery and oppression". On March 8, 1775, one month after Paine became the editor of The Pennsylvania Magazine, the magazine published an anonymous article titled "African Slavery in America," the first prominent piece in the colonies proposing the emancipation of African-American slaves and the abolition of slavery. Paine is often credited with writing the piece, on the basis of later testimony by Benjamin Rush, cosigner of the Declaration of Independence. Citing a lack of further evidence of Paine's authorship, however, Eric Foner and Alfred Owen Aldridge no longer consider it to be one of his works. During the American Revolutionary War, the British implemented several policies which allowed fugitive slaves fleeing from American enslavers to find refuge within British lines. Writing in response to these policies, Paine wrote in Common Sense that Britain "hath stirred up the Indians and the Negroes to destroy us". Paine, together with Joel Barlow, unsuccessfully tried to convince President Thomas Jefferson to not import the institution of slavery to the territory acquired in the Louisiana Purchase, suggesting he rather settle it with free Black families and German immigrants. State funded social programs In his Rights of Man, Part Second, Paine advocated a comprehensive program of state support for the population to ensure the welfare of society, including state subsidy for poor people, state-financed universal public education, and state-sponsored prenatal care and postnatal care, including state subsidies to families at childbirth. Recognizing that a person's "labor ought to be over" before old age, Paine also called for a state pension to all workers starting at age 50, which would be doubled at age 60. Agrarian Justice His last pamphlet, Agrarian Justice, published in the winter of 1795, opposed agrarian law and agrarian monopoly and further developed his ideas in the Rights of Man about how land ownership separated the majority of people