Horace Allen that no harm would come to the independence leaders. As one of the Independence Club’s leading agitators, Rhee had little confidence in the king’s word.
One day, however, restless in his confinement, Rhee asked a member of the hospital staff, Dr. Harry C. Sherman, if he might accompany him on his rounds. The doctor assented, but scarcely had the two left the compound when Rhee was spotted, seized by court detectives, and thrown into jail.
In a country where torture has long been an accepted means of police interrogation, Rhee was fortunate in having missionary protectors. His American friends made regular visits to his prison to be sure that he was not being tortured. Minister Allen, a onetime missionary himself, protested the persecution of the Independence Club as being in violation of the king’s word.
With such outside aid Rhee’s release might well have been secured through pressure on the court. In the course of a visit, however, one of Rhee’s colleagues rashly passed him a pistol. An escape plan was arranged whereby Rhee and two others would force their way out of prison and then seek the protection of a pro-independence crowd outside the prison. Brandishing the pistol, the three made good their escape, but because of confusion in the timing no crowd was in the square, and only one of the three was able to make his way to a foreign compound and avoid recapture.3
When Rhee was returned to prison, it was the beginning of seven years’ incarceration—years which would see the death of the Independence Club, the further deterioration of the monarchy, and a supplanting of Russian influence in Korea by the ubiquitous Japanese. To Rhee personally, his prison years would mean an end to his early marriage, which had been arranged by his parents and consummated in 1896.* But his term in prison would also go far in hardening his resolve to continue to work for Korean independence.
For the first seven months of his prison term Rhee received standard Korean treatment at the hands of his jailors. Hours of physical torture alternated with periods of dampness and filth in prison isolation. According to his biographer, two sticks would be placed between Rhee’s legs; his legs were then bound tightly together and the sticks twisted. Sharp pieces of bamboo were tied between his fingers and his hand tightened until flesh sheared from the bone. For hours at a time he was clamped into stocks, with a 20-pound canque of wood around his neck so that he 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,
