The Hungry Prisoner

During the Revolutionary War, a man was charged in Pennsylvania with high treason for levying war by joining the armies of the King of Great Britain. By his own confession he had actually enlisted in a corps belonging to the enemy. But he had first been taken prisoner by the British and confined at Wilmington, and he said he enlisted only out of fear of starving, with a sincere intention of escaping. The evidence also showed that he then remained with the British troops for ten or eleven months, during which he might easily have escaped. Under the law, only fear of immediate death, not fear of some lesser injury, could excuse joining an enemy. The defence relied on his account of hunger and compulsion.