Providence and Politics: Horace N. Allen and the Early US-Korea Encounter, 1884-1894 By Andrea Yun Kwon A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Paula S. Fass, Chair Professor Andrew E. Barshay Professor Hong Yung Lee Fall 2012 © 2012 by Andrea Yun Kwon All rights reserved. Abstract Providence and Politics: Horace N. Allen and the Early US-Korea Encounter, 1884-1894 by Andrea Yun Kwon Doctor of Philosophy in History University of California, Berkeley Professor Paula S. Fass, Chair This dissertation examines the career of Horace Newton Allen, an American physician who became the first Protestant missionary to reside in Chosŏn Korea. It focuses specifically on the initial decade of his tenure on the peninsula (1884-1894), the period when he transitioned from a participant of the Protestant foreign mission movement to a member of the American diplomatic service. These years also comprised the formative era of relations between the United States and Korea. Through a close look at Allen’s work and activities, this study uses his story as window into the broader dynamics of the early American-Korean encounter. In particular, it challenges previous characterizations of Horace Allen as an exemplar of US expansionism, and argues instead that his career was shaped in large part by the divergence in American interests vis-à-vis Korea during the late nineteenth century. 1 Table of Contents Table of Contents i Dedication ii Acknowledgements iii Introduction 1 Prologue: Departure 7 Chapter One: Arrival 14 Chapter Two: Coup 40 Chapter Three: Crucible 61 Chapter Four: Washington 81 Chapter Five: Return 103 Afterword 129 Bibliography 132 i To Hea Gyung Kim ii Acknowledgements I owe many thanks to those who helped make the completion of this project possible. My teachers at UC Berkeley—especially James Kettner, Jon Gjerde, Irwin Scheiner, Andrew Barshay, and Hong Yung Lee—guided me at various stages, offering along the way extraordinary models of scholarship. My committee chair and adviser, Paula S. Fass, was the first professor I met at Berkeley. Her mentoring has made all the difference. In our department, Mabel Lee, Barbara Hayashida, and Hilja New gave indispensable advice and assistance, and did so with boundless patience. I am also indebted to the staff and archivists at the various institutions I visited over the years. Mark Shenise at the Methodist Archives in Madison, New Jersey, was particularly generous with his time and pointed me to important sources. Financial support from the university, the History department, the Center for Korean Studies, the Korea Foundation, and the Koret Foundation provided funding for both my studies and research. It is a privilege to acknowledge here my family and friends. The constancy of my parents, siblings, and in-laws gave me the confidence that this dissertation would someday see an end. A big thanks to my sister, Christine, a master storyteller and the source of many late night laughs. One of the parts of graduate school I have cherished most is time spent with colleagues. I am especially grateful to Sang Chi, Ben Urwand, Vicki Fung, Taejin Hwang, Sungyun Lim, Candace Chen, and Margaret Tillman for their good company and friendship. And to my comrade in everything else, David Kyung-il Park: Thank you for reminding me daily of the best things. iii Introduction Few names are more recognizable to students of early American-Korean relations than that of Horace Newton Allen. And for good reason. During the twenty years the angular, bespectacled physician from Ohio lived in Chosŏn Korea, he supervised the kingdom’s first Western-style hospital and medical school, cultivated close ties with the monarch, helped secure gold mining and other concessions for American business, played a central role in Korean migration to Hawaii, and, for nearly a decade, served as the United States ambassador in Seoul. As historian Wayne Patterson summarizes, “In the one hundred years since Korea was opened to the West no foreigner became more involved in Korea’s affairs than Horace Allen.”1 Yet despite Allen’s significance to the late-nineteenth-century encounter between the United States and Korea, little has been written in depth about this missionary-turned- diplomat. Fred Harvey Harrington’s God, Mammon, and the Japanese, published more than half a century ago (and at a moment, Harrington later noted, when there was so paltry an interest in Korea that he decided to omit its name from the main title), remains the single, classic work.2 At the same time, however, Allen continues to be the favored reference in general discussions about early US involvement on the peninsula. It is as if he has been cloaked, one could say, in a kind of superficial ubiquity. A few reasons might account for these trends. On the one hand, though part of Allen’s historical importance lies in his having been the first Protestant missionary to reside in Korea, his record is not exactly the stuff of missionary hagiography. His fewer than five years as a Presbyterian mission agent shrink when compared to the multiple decades others gave to the mission endeavor. But it was not only time; it was also the contentiousness of his tenure. In fact some of the most biting criticism of Horace Allen— for example, that he was never a “real” or genuine missionary—have come from those directly involved in or sympathetic to the Protestant mission cause.3 On the other hand, Allen has also been portrayed, often in broad strokes, not as an exception but as an exemplar—as a representative embodiment of America’s growing 1 Wayne Patterson, “Sugar-Coated Diplomacy: Horace Allen and Korean Immigration to Hawaii, 1902- 1905,” Diplomatic History 3 (winter 1979): 19. 2 Fred Harvey Harrington, God, Mammon, and the Japanese: Dr. Horace N. Allen and Korean-American Relations, 1884-1905 (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1944). Fred Harvey Harrington, “An American View of Korean-American Relations, 1882-1910,” in One Hundred Years of Korean-American Relations, 1882-1892, ed. Yur-Bok Lee and Wayne Patterson (University, Ala.: University of Alabama Press), 46. As far as I am aware there are only two other longer-length works (in English) that address the topic of Horace Allen, both of which are theses: Wi Jo Kang, “Horace Newton Allen’s Contribution to Korea, 1884-1905” (Master’s thesis, University of Chicago, 1962); Henry Hyunsuk Kim, “Horace N. Allen: Expansionism and Missions in Korea and Hawaii” (Ph.D. diss., Trinity International University, 2010). The best Korean-language work on Allen is Kyŏng Bae Min, Allen ŭi sŏnʼgyo wa kŭndae Han-Mi oegyo [Dr. Horace N. Allen and His Mission in Korea, 1884-1905] (Seoul: Yonsei University Press, 1991). 3 See for example James S. Gale, Korea in Transition (New York: Laymen’s Missionary Movement, 1909), 163; Martha Huntley, To Start a Work: The Foundations of Protestant Mission in Korea, 1884-1919 (Seoul: Presbyterian Church of Korea, 1987), 68, 111; Daniel M. Davies, The Life and Thought of Henry Gerhard Appenzeller (1858-1902) (Lewiston, New York: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1988), 131. 1 reach abroad during the post-Civil War decades. In particular he has attracted arguments about how the United States’ outward religious, economic, and political impulses were intimately, even indistinctly, interconnected. One of the consequences of this assumption has been a flattening of Allen into a single-dimensional figure, and one not always entirely believable. In turn his range of activities, too, can collapse into a monolithic illustration of American expansionism.4 This dissertation is an attempt to begin reconstructing and reexamining Horace Allen’s remarkable career. It concentrates on the first ten years of his connection to Korea (1884-1894), the period when he transitioned from a participant of the Protestant foreign mission enterprise to a member of the American diplomatic service. These were foundational, at times greatly unsettling, years for Allen. They are also, I believe, the most misunderstood. Indeed in contrast to impressions that from the outset Allen was a freewheeling opportunist—someone who, as one historian described, “nicely combined his Presbyterian missionary dedication with a robber-baron passion for making money”— the evidence reveals a more complicated story.5 Allen himself was a person of varied characteristics. He was ambitious and self- conscious, cantankerous and persevering, adroit and evasive. He seemed to make enemies almost as easily as he made friends. The primary concern here is not, however, Allen’s personality, though intriguing in its own right and obviously fundamental to his decision- making. While its focus lies on one person, this study is intended to be less a biography than an exploration of the circumstances, events, and ideas that shaped Allen’s choices and actions. A fresh look at his first decade, I would argue, will allow us not only a clearer picture of his career on the peninsula, but also greater insight into the early US- Korea relationship. Horace Allen arrived in Seoul, the capital of the Chosŏn dynasty, during one of the most turbulent periods in modern Korean history. The last of the major states in East Asia to sign treaties with the West, the kingdom also faced peculiar challenges as it confronted a collapsing Sinocentric world order. Like other countries in the region, Korea witnessed firsthand the manifestations of the Western intrusion into Asia starting in the mid-nineteenth century. Yet in part because of its ideological resilience, the peninsula was able to avoid entering into the modern international system—a system based, in theory, on individually equal states—until the century’s last quarter.