From Korea, 1871, to
Samoa, 1899
In 1861 the U.S. Navy was redirected from fighting small
wars to focusing its energies on the deadliest conflict in American history.
This required a buildup of startling proportions. At the beginning of the Civil
War, the Union Navy had deployed just 68 vessels. It emerged from the conflict
with 626 ships, including 65 ironclads. If it had desired, the United States
could have challenged the Royal Navy for command of the seas. But for the time
being, America had its fill of martial splendor.
The pacifist mood that so often takes hold after a big war
gripped the country again. The army was demobilized, the navy scrapped. By 1881
only 50 vessels remained in the fleet, most of them obsolete hulks. That was
just fine as far as the post–Civil War administrations were concerned. One
story that gained wide circulation had Rutherford B. Hayes’s navy secretary,
upon first boarding a warship, exclaiming in surprise, “Why the derned thing is
hollow!” Though undoubtedly apocryphal, this tale accurately conveyed the lack
of interest in all matters naval displayed by the politicians of the time.
The crabby, conservative naval establishment, riven by feuds
between line and staff officers, and run by autonomous bureau chieftains, did
not help its own cause by resisting innovations such as steam power and rifled
cannons. Its senior officer from 1869 until his death in 1891 was Admiral David
Dixon Porter, an aging relic of the old navy forged by his father and the rest
of “Preble’s Boys”—a force, it was said, composed of wooden ships and iron men.
As the navy declined, so did the frequency of small wars
overseas. In the 20 years between 1841 and 1861, the marines landed abroad 24
times. The next 20 years saw half as many landings—only 12. There was a similar
falloff in diplomatic negotiations by naval officers—from 201 in the 20 years
before the Civil War, to 101 in the 20 years after. This was related to another
trend: While American overseas trade soared in the years after the Civil War,
the percentage carried in U.S. flag ships plummeted—and so did the need for
naval protection of commerce. Congress subsidized the building of Western
railroads as a national priority but did not think the decline of the merchant
marine was important enough to warrant much action.
The nation’s attention and energy were directed elsewhere:
to the Reconstruction of the South, the winning of the West, and the
industrialization of the Northeast and Midwest. What little military activity
the U.S. engaged in for the next few decades was primarily directed against Plains
Indians who had the misfortune to find themselves in the path of Yankee
settlers. After 1890, the year when the frontier was officially declared
closed, America’s attention would once again focus on expansion abroad. In the
meantime, one of the few expeditions undertaken in the spirit of Porter and
Perry was the foray to Korea in 1871.
Korea
Appropriately enough, the commander of this fantastic voyage
was the scion of a great naval dynasty stretching back to the service’s early
glory days. Rear Admiral John Rodgers was the son of Commodore John Rodgers,
who had served in the quasi-war with France, the Barbary Wars, and the War of
1812, and had gone on to become the navy’s senior officer from 1821 to 1839.
The family was linked by marriage to the illustrious Perry clan; one of John
Rodgers Sr.’s sisters married the brother of Commodores Oliver Hazard Perry and
Matthew C. Perry.
Young John Rodgers became a midshipman in 1828 at 16 and
learned his trade the old-fashioned way—aboard ship. Unlike most naval officers
of his era, he attended college, spending a year at the University of Virginia,
but he headed back to sea without graduating. Promotion in those days was
entirely on the basis of seniority, so a man could wait decades in rank until
someone above him died or retired. Rodgers made rear admiral—a new rank—only
after the Civil War, where he distinguished himself as a commander of ironclads
in the Union navy. (It was by no means certain which side he would fight for,
since his father, the commodore, had been a Maryland-born slave owner.)
In 1870, at age 58, stout and white-haired, having already
spent 24 years at sea, Rodgers took over the somewhat ramshackle Asiatic
Squadron (formerly the East India Squadron), based in Hong Kong. He had three
steam-powered iron gunboats—the Ashuelot, Monocacy, and Palos—along with three
wooden ships, the Colorado, Alaska, and Benicia, that combined sail and steam
power. The navy still had reservations about the new-fangled, steam-belching
monsters, and anyway coal was hard to come by, so captains had instructions to
use sails whenever possible and resort to steam only when necessary in battle.
As Perry had opened Japan, so Rodgers set as his objective
opening Korea. The Hermit Kingdom was nominally a vassal of Peking but in
reality had control over its own destiny. Its de facto ruler was the regent, Yi
Ha-ung, known as the Taewongun (“Prince of the Great Court”), part of the
Choson dynasty that had ruled the peninsula since the fourteenth century. The
xenophobic Taewongun was determined to keep Korea closed to the West. In 1866
he launched a campaign to eradicate Christianity, executing nine French
missionaries and some 8,000 of their converts. France sent a punitive
expedition, but it was repulsed by the Koreans.
The Koreans generally treated shipwrecked mariners more
kindly, returning a number of American sailors safely to China. But in 1866, a
U.S.-registered merchant schooner, the General Sherman, was burned and its 27
crew members (mainly Chinese) killed near Pyongyang. The Koreans later
explained that the crew had brought this fate upon themselves by entering
interior waters without permission, kidnapping a Korean official, and firing
into a crowd on shore. This incident nevertheless prompted the Grant
administration to mount a major effort to secure from Korea treaties governing
shipwrecks and, if possible, trade. Chosen to carry out this assignment were
Rear Admiral Rodgers and the U.S. minister to China, Frederick F. Low.
On May 16, 1871, five ships of the Asiatic Squadron,
mounting 85 guns and carrying 1,230 officers and men, set off from Nagasaki,
Japan, headed for the great unknown—a land where, it was rumored, the natives
diced and pickled unwelcome visitors. “Whether this is positively true or not I
can’t say,” Marine Captain McLane Tilton wrote to his wife, “but you may
imagine it is not with a great pleasure I anticipate landing with the small
force we have, against a populous country containing 10,000,000 savages!”
The expedition reached Chemulpo (now Inchon), Korea’s
premier port, by the end of May and tried to open diplomatic negotiations.
While this was going on, Rodgers sent small boats to do surveying work on the
Han River leading toward Seoul. The Koreans naturally took umbrage at
foreigners conducting a military survey of one of their most strategically
sensitive waterways. On June 2, one of these surveying parties was fired upon
by forts on Kangwha Island. The USS Palos and Monocacy promptly returned fire,
silencing the fort. Afterward, Minister Low demanded an apology. The proud
Koreans refused; they thought it was the foreign barbarians who should
apologize. So, in the time-honored fashion of the navy, Rear Admiral Rodgers
decided to mount a punitive expedition.
The attack got under way on June 10, 1871, a clear, warm
day, with steam launches and cutters landing 542 sailors and 109 marines. The
first two Korean forts fell with little trouble. The next day—after becoming
the first Western troops to spend the night on Korean soil—the expedition faced
its toughest challenge: the hilltop fort known as Kwangsong (“the citadel”). To
reach it, the Americans had to race down a hill into a ravine and then back
up—straight into the mouth of the Korean cannons. The first man over the
parapet was killed, and so was the first who entered the fort, but then the
Koreans ran out of time to reload and it became a savage hand-to-hand struggle.
“Corean sword crossed Yankee cutlass,” wrote a contemporary chronicler, “and
clubbed carbine brained the native whose spear it dashed aside.” The defenders
fought valiantly, but they were no match for the Americans, who had much more
modern weapons, and less than an hour later Old Glory was fluttering overhead.
Virtually all of the 300 defenders had been killed or wounded, or had committed
suicide, while only three Americans were killed and 10 wounded. Nine sailors
and six marines won Medals of Honor for their heroism.
Having “avenged” this “insult to the flag,” the Americans
reboarded their ships and spent three monotonous weeks waiting for the Koreans
to answer their requests for trade negotiations. After it became clear that
Seoul had no interest in reaching a deal, Rear Admiral Rodgers had no choice
but to sail away on July 3, 1871, no treaty in hand.
The Taewongun claimed that the “barbarians” had been
repulsed, but the ease with which the Americans had destroyed Korea’s most
formidable fortifications gave added impetus to pro-Western modernizers, who
toppled him two years later. Japan became the first foreign nation to sign a
treaty with Seoul, in 1876; the second was the U.S., in 1882, thanks to the
skillful diplomacy of Commodore Robert W. Shufeldt. Commander Winfield Scott
Schley, Rodgers’s adjutant, thought in retrospect that the treaty was made
possible by the Koreans’ memories of their defeat at the hands of warlike
Americans a decade earlier. Perhaps. But the 1871 expedition had at most an
indirect influence. And by fostering ill will on both sides, it may actually
have delayed the establishment of U.S.-Korean relations.
Panama
The Korean expedition was the second biggest U.S. landing
abroad between the Mexican War and the Spanish-American War. The biggest
occurred in Panama in 1885. This was the culmination of U.S. landings almost
too numerous to list throughout Latin America in the nineteenth century. U.S.
sailors and marines landed in Argentina in 1833, 1852, and 1890; Peru in 1835;
Nicaragua in 1852, 1853, 1854, 1896, and 1899; Uruguay in 1855, 1858, 1868;
Mexico in 1870; Chile in 1891; and in Panama, part of Colombia, in 1860, 1873,
1885, 1895. Many of those countries would see even more numerous American
interventions in the twentieth century.
These landings were so frequent in part because U.S.
embassies and legations did not have permanent marine guards until the
twentieth century; whenever trouble occurred in the nineteenth century, marines
had to be put ashore. A familiar pattern developed: A revolution takes place;
violence breaks out; American merchants and diplomats feel threatened; U.S.
warships appear offshore; landing parties patrol the city for several days;
then they sail away. The 1885 landing in Panama differed from the normal
pattern only in the size of the landing force, in part a product of the fact
that even before the construction of a canal, the U.S. had more pressing
interests in the isthmus than in the rest of Latin America.
In 1846 Colombia had signed a treaty giving the U.S. transit
rights across Panama. Nine years later, the world’s first intercontinental
railroad opened, running the 48 miles from Colón on the Caribbean to Panama
City on the Pacific. This became a vital transit route between the eastern
United States and California, acquired from Mexico in 1848. The Panama Railroad
Company and the Pacific Mail Steamship Company, which used the railroad to transport
mail under a federal subsidy, were both owned by wealthy New Yorkers who got
considerably more wealthy as a result of these lucrative ventures.
Unfortunately for them, the government in Bogotá always had a tenuous grip on
its Panama province. The resulting revolutions led to frequent marine landings.
In 1885 an insurrection elsewhere in Colombia depleted the
Colombian army garrison in Panama, leading two different sets of rebels to try
their luck. Former Panamanian president Rafael Aizpuru seized Panama City,
killing at least 25 people and disrupting the Panama Railroad. Aizpuru
threatened “to kill every American on the isthmus.” Meanwhile, a Haitian
mulatto named Pedro Prestan, fired by a hatred of all white men, led a small
band of followers to terrorize Colón, a small, pestilent town with no proper
sewers or bathrooms, garbage piled in the streets, and an abundance of
oversized rats.
On March 29, 1885, a Pacific Mail steamer, the Colon,
arrived from New York full of arms. Prestan seized six Americans—the Pacific
Mail superintendent, the general agent of the steamship line, the American
consul, the superintendent of the Panama Railroad, and two officers from the
USS Galena, a gunboat anchored in the harbor—and threatened to kill them if the
arms from the Colon were not turned over to him. The American consul gave in
and told the Pacific Mail company to release the weapons. Upon hearing this,
Prestan released his hostages. But Theodore F. Kane, skipper of the Galena,
blocked the weapons transfer, leading Prestan to seize two of the Pacific Mail
employees once again. The following day, March 31, Kane landed 126 men in Colón
to protect American property but, strictly following his orders, he refused to
arrest Prestan. Before long Colombian troops also arrived and engaged Prestan’s
followers in a pitched battle outside of town, during which the two American
hostages managed to escape. Prestan retreated into Colón and set it afire,
reducing the town to cinders.
The Cleveland administration had just taken office, and the
new navy secretary, a corporate lawyer named William C. Whitney, decided enough
was enough. Under the terms of the 1848 treaty with Colombia, he ordered the
navy and marines to scrape together an expeditionary force consisting of eight
ships and more than 2,000 officers and men. This was pretty much the outer
limit of what the U.S. could muster in those days. But it was enough. By the
end of April 11, 1885, the expeditionary force had control of the entire length
of the Panama Railroad, with marine guards in white pith helmets posted along
the route.
The marines next captured Panama City without a shot being
fired and arrested Rafael Aizpuru. He offered to declare Panama a sovereign
state with U.S. backing, but the expedition’s commander, Rear Admiral James E.
Jouett, declined. Nobody had given him orders to carve out a new country. The
rebel leader was turned over to Colombian troops, and by May 25, 1885, less
than two months after landing, the entire U.S. force had withdrawn. Rafael
Aizpuru received only 10 years in exile; Pedro Prestan was hanged by the
Colombian government.
While the U.S. had not exactly been isolationist or even
neutral—“It cannot be denied that our presence on the Isthmus was of great
value to the Government forces,” remarked Admiral Jouett—the Cleveland
administration had been determined to avoid a long-term entanglement in Panama.
That resolution, harking back to the admonitions of Washington and Jefferson,
was now on its last legs.
