Korea Crisis 1871

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In 1863-1864, despite the Civil War, the U.S. Navy deployed one armed warship alongside British, French, and Dutch vessels to punish the Japanese for their antiforeign riots and harassment of merchant ships. At Shimonoseki this firepower destroyed forts and boats, opening the strait to trade once again. Internally divided and militarily weak, the Japanese could not resist the $3 million indemnity forced on them by the Western powers. (The United States received its share, $780,000, but returned it to Japan in 1883.) Then, in the Convention of 1866, Japan reluctantly bestowed low tariff on the Western nations. By the late 1890s, America's trade with Japan surpassed its trade with China but still constituted only about 2 percent of total U.S. foreign commerce. Soon the Japanese consciously adopted a policy of "westernization" (which included learning American baseball), persuading some Americans that the Japanese, unlike the Chinese, had become "civilized."

Korea became one of Japan's victims. This kingdom, called the "hermit nation" because of its self-imposed isolation, remained technically a dependency of China -- a tributary state that relied on Beijing to handle its external relations. But China's weakness denied Korea any protection from the predatory Japanese and Westerners, including the French, who used gunboats in the 1860s to punish Korea's mistreatment of missionaries. Secretary Seward hoped to trade with the kingdom, but the fate of the merchant ship General Sherman revealed obstacles. In 1866, without Korean permission, the trading schooner pushed upriver. Its captain became embroiled in a dispute with villagers, who burned the ship and killed all aboard. The following year, Commodore Shufeldt investigated; he recommended a punitive force to teach Korea the lesson "taught to other Eastern nations, that it can no longer maintain that contemptuous exclusiveness . Not until 1871 did the United States retaliate. That year a mission, headed by the American minister to China and buttressed by five warships, sought not only to deal with the General Sherman incident but also to establish commercial relations and to guarantee the protection of shipwrecked Americans. When the fleet sailed up the Han River, Koreans fired on the advance party, whereupon American guns bombarded their forts, killing at least 300 defenders. "Every urchin in our kingdom [will] spit at and curse you," and the whole world "will indignantly sympathize with us," said the Koreans as they again rejected any treaty .

Japan battered Korea's gates open by imposing a treaty in 1876 that recognized Korean independence from China. The Chinese then encouraged Western contacts with Korea to thwart the Japanese -- "to play off the foreign enemies one against the other," reasoned China's chief diplomat. In 1882 a Korean-American treaty provided for American diplomatic representation (a legation in Seoul) and trade relations; the Treaty of Chemulpo passed the Senate the following year. Throughout the 1880s American business people built trade links; even Thomas Edison signed a contract for the installation of electric lights in the royal residence. For the United States, however, Korea constituted a peripheral interest, and Washington could not prevent it from moving into Japan's orbit. As China seemed increasingly prostrate, Japan took advantage. In the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895 Japanese forces crushed the Chinese. The United States remained neutral. Americans, including the missionaries, seemed to favor a Japanese triumph to force China into the modem age. Victorious Japan soon dominated Korea, and China lay humiliated, all the more vulnerable to Western and Japanese imperialists. In the late 1890s, to protect their interests in China, Americans turned to the Open Door policy.

text from Paterson Chapter 5 pp. 183-184