Korea, US and General Sherman incident

By Kyung Moon Hwang

Sensible people around the world these days are wondering which of the two political leaders of North Korea and the United States, respectively, is more bombastic, foolish, unpredictable and dangerous. It used to be that the inflammatory wild rhetoric, straight out of an elementary school playground, was exclusive to the North Korean leadership, but the Kims have met their match in Donald Trump. The great fear is that this man’s actions will be as appalling as his words and set off an unspeakable catastrophe on the Korean peninsula.

Readers might object to this comparison as simplistic, given the very different character of the two countries, but in considering, historically, how the United States and North Korea have come to the brink of military confrontation, one cannot help but detect resemblances. Thinking about this problem can be informed greatly, in other words, by considering the patterns of American-Korean interactions from the past, and here we must go back a century and a half. The relationship began, in fact, very badly, in the late summer of 1866.

That was when an intruding Western merchant ship, buoyed by the annual monsoons, steamed up the Daedong River to Pyongyang despite stern warnings earlier from Korean authorities to retreat. When the rains subsided, the ship became stuck on a sandbar, and following unsuccessful negotiations to reach a solution, as well as the foreigners’ abduction of a Korean official, Koreans set the ship on fire. Crew members fleeing to shore were all killed.

The American captain, who had led a handful of Western officers and a crew of mostly Malay and Chinese sailors, had commandeered a British ship in Shanghai and, in embarking on a hasty mission to force open Korea to trade relations, renamed the ship the “General Sherman.” General Tecumseh William Sherman had been a fierce Northern commander in the American Civil War, just concluded the year before in 1865, who had mercilessly torn through parts of the South in one of the war’s most memorable episodes.

So began the history of U.S.-Korean relations, through the provocations of a few delusional Americans convinced they could push themselves into a country about which they knew almost nothing and force its government to change fundamental, longstanding behaviors. In hindsight, this was the height of haughty stupidity, but the lessons apparently were not learned, for a small fleet of American marines tried to invade Korea five years later, in 1871, partly to exact vengeance and partly to attempt the same kind of gunboat diplomacy again.

Meanwhile, back in the United States, the aftermath of a Civil War fought over slavery, and legally ending it, was a century of segregation and terror suffered by former slaves in the South, as well as legalized discrimination and normalization of racial prejudice across the country. The continuing difficulties of overcoming this tragic history explains a lot how someone like Donald Trump, whose bigotry remains on clear display, could win the presidency in this day and age.

Apparently, to him and many of his followers, the certain deaths of tens of thousands of Koreans in another war appear of little concern. But just as important has been the imperialist impulse of American leaders since the 19th century, which also drove American interventions that helped divide Korea in the mid-20th century; Trump is merely a childishly unconstrained personification of this mentality.

Within Korea, the General Sherman Incident of 1866 further shaped the dominant reaction, among the country’s political and social leaders, to prospects of contact with the outside world. In fact, earlier that year the Prince Regent, or Daewongun, who held control of the throne in place of his adolescent son, had ordered a brutal persecution of Catholics, killing hundreds of believers, including French priests working in secret. A French armada hence launched a punitive expedition on the west coast, which served only to harden Koreans’ resistance.

This tradition, which one might call a xenophobic, isolationist strategy of national preservation, remained strong in Korea, taking various forms. It continued to push for the expulsion of foreign influences, people and ideas at the turn of the 20th century, even when those interactions were benign or helpful. One might suggest that Koreans’ sad history in the early 20th century, when they lost national sovereignty, validated such fears, but one could also argue that those fears prevented Korean leaders from preventing such terrible outcomes.

The subsequent period of Japanese colonial rule, from 1910 to 1945, further complicated this issue of how to respond to both the dangers and benefits of the outside world, but in any case the struggle for independence strengthened the appeal of nationalist isolationism. Following liberation, this view thrived in both Koreas, but eventually it became more dominant in North Korea, where it became expressed as the official ideology of “juche,” which can be translated as “independence” but has effectively functioned as the totalitarian legitimization of a single family’s brutal rule.

Among the many historical fabrications of this regime has been the claim that the peasant leader of those Koreans who attacked the General Sherman in 1866 was a direct ancestor of the current North Korean leader. It’s a shame that, since historical developments in both countries thereafter have made tensions between the U.S. and North Korea a recurring reality, such a ridiculous story might as well have been true.

Kyung Moon Hwang is a professor at the Department of History, University of Southern California. He is the author of "A History of Korea-An Episodic Narrative" (Second edition, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). Contact khwang3@gmail.com.