could neither sit nor stand.4 Nonetheless Rhee took everything his tormenters could offer, and when he became president of South Korea these and some additional refinements would be used on his own political opponents.
When Rhee was finally brought to trial, he might well have received a death sentence. Several factors, however, worked in his favor: the circumstances of his original apprehension, which prompted Rhee’s missionary friends to maintain that his being with Dr. Sherman implied immunity from arrest; Minister Allen’s known partiality for the Independence Club, which he freely expressed to the king, with whom he was a favorite; and finally the fact that it was not Rhee but Choe Chong-sik, who had been apprehended with him at the time of the escape, who was most wanted by the royal court. At the trial Choe was sentenced to death, Rhee to life imprisonment.
Rhee’s incarceration coincided with an ominous new trend in Korea’s international affairs. Japan, quick to take advantage of Russia’s embarrassment when the Yi king asked for the withdrawal of Russian advisors, concluded with Russia the Nishi-Rosen agreement pledging each to consult the other with respect to the appointment of advisors to the Korean government. More importantly, Russia pledged not to hinder Japan’s expanding commercial interests in Korea. Mutual acknowledgment of Korea’s “entire independence” suggested that Japan was prepared to try new tactics in connection with the country.
The years leading to the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5 were marked by accelerated economic imperialism by the Japanese. After Japan had been twice thwarted in attempts to seize control by force, Tokyo’s use of the velvet glove proved effective in the end. In July 1898, Japan gained concessions to build one railroad from Seoul to Pusan and another from Seoul to Inchon. In August, Minister Allen reported that strategic property near the treaty ports had been largely bought up by the Japanese, and that many Japanese citizens were residing in the interior of Korea in violation of agreements limiting foreigners to the treaty ports.5
Russia’s attempts to check the Japanese met with little success. By 1903, however, tensions arising from conflicting timber claims along the Yalu River had brought Russo-Japanese relations near the breaking point. Militarists in Japan called for war, and the following year brought the conflict which established a Japanese protectorate over the Hermit Kingdom.
By the time of his trial Rhee’s darkest hour had passed. In addition to his life sentence he was to have received one hundred blows with a bamboo rod. But the judge left the chamber, and the guard was friendly. Rhee was spared.
In prison Rhee once again benefited from the attention of American missionaries, who brought him food and reading matter. Both the warden and his assistant befriended him, and the hard labor which was to have been part of the sentence was quickly forgotten. For Rhee, as for many another revolutionary, prison proved to be a period of activity and dedication.
Considering the favors Rhee had received from American Methodists in Korea, it is scarcely surprising that prison brought about his conversion to that faith. In 1904, he wrote of his earlier belief:
“It must be remembered that the great ambition which led me to the [Paichai] school was to learn English, and English only. This ambition I quickly achieved, but I soon discovered I was learning something of far greater importance than the English language. I was imbibing ideas of political equality and liberty. . . .
“Then I began to understand that political changes do not come by themselves and are not only a question of laws and regulations. There must also come deep and abiding changes within the hearts and minds of the people—and particularly in the ruling class. I began to listen a little bit to the morning services in the chapel and when I listened I heard that Jesus was more than a symbol of salvation in afterlife. He was also a Great Teacher who brought a gospel of brotherly love and service. I began to have more respect for these foreign religious teachings and in my own private mind I began to consider that maybe Jesus deserved to rank somewhere near Confucius. But further than this I could not or would not go.”6
Thus prison completed a conversion already underway. Although Rhee’s later life has underscored the contradiction between Rhee the Christian minister-teacher and Rhee the political leader, he was to be closely associated with various forms of Christian activity for much of his career. As with everything else, however, his religious work took a back seat to a lifetime of agitation for Korea.
As Rhee’s prison lot improved, he was able to resume his political writing. Editorials for the revived Maiyil Sinmun were smuggled from the prison and printed anonymously, but the background of their authorship soon became known. They were read by Lady Um, consort to the King and sometime supporter of reform movements in Korea, who encouraged the warden to be lenient to Rhee and his associates. By the traditional Korean means of having a friend in court, Rhee’s lot was eased, and he was encouraged to pursue his writing further.
When Rhee turned to composing a book to propagate Korean independence, he found a small but enthusiastic audience. The corruption and weakness of the Korean court were recognized by progressive Koreans, but the dissolution of the Independence Club had left them dispirited and without leadership. The absence of progressives such as Philip Jaisohn, in America, and Kim Ok-kun, in Shanghai, tended to enhance the popularity of hitherto secondary leaders such as Rhee.
The resulting literary effort, The Spirit of Independence, was largely a collection of political essays and admonitions, with chapters dealing with subjects as diverse as astronomy, “stubborn” China, America’s Declaration of Independence, and the “foundations of true loyalty.” Rhee has acknowledged: “I wrote . . . with very few reference materials, and . . . addressed it in very simple terms to the Korean people, most of whom are uneducated and without any earlier knowledge of the Western world” Although Rhee’s own formal Western education was limited to his two years at Paichai, it is significant that even in his twenties he found himself preaching the gospel of independence to people willing to listen. He wrote:
“If your own heart is without patriotism, your heart is your enemy. You must struggle against your own feelings if they urge you to forgo the struggle for the common cause. Let us examine our hearts now, at this moment. If you find within yourself any single thought of abandoning the welfare of your country, tear it out. Do not wait for others to lead or to do what must be done, but arouse yourself. . . .
“As I have indicated before, to live in this nation is comparable to being a passenger on a ship in a cruel sea. How can you be so indifferent as not to be concerned with the affairs of your own nation, but to insist they are the business of high officials? . . .
“The relationship between you and your nation may seem so remote that you have little reason to love it or to make efforts to save it. Therefore, two enemies must be guarded against: first, the people who try to destroy the nation; and second, those who sit passively by, being without any hope or sense of responsibility.”7
Thus Rhee appears not to have been pressing a specific program of reform, but rather to have been attempting to awaken his countrymen to the peril from abroad. The Spirit of Independence has had none of the impact abroad of other prison-inspired volumes, but in Korea, where independence was itself a new concept to a people long used to Chinese suzerainty, the work was not without significance despite its small distribution.
There were other independence leaders in Seoul Prison besides Rhee, and several would be associated with Rhee at various times after their release. Lee Chung-hyuk would accompany him to the United States in 1904 to plead Korea’s cause in America. Park Young-man would become a rival of his among American-oriented Koreans in Hawaii. Hugh Cynn, a boyhood friend of Rhee’s, would oppose him for the South Korean presidency in 1952.
The beginning of the Russo-Japanese War in 1904 stirred hopes among the prisoners that a political amnesty would follow Korea’s declaration of neutrality, but court reactionaries were not anxious to be troubled again by rabble-rousing young reformers. Some persons in government circles interpreted the United States—Korean friendship treaty of 1882 as guaranteeing American protection against aggression. Minister Allen had indeed assured the king as late as 1900 that “the treaty powers would assist Korea in time of distress, by their good offices, and recalled to his mind the fact that in 1894, at the time of the Sino-Japanese War, when