Slavery, bondage and social hierarchy

For the past few years Americans have been commemorating the 150th anniversary of their Civil War (1860-65), which was about many things but ultimately became a conflict over the issue of slavery.

As the war came to a close, an amendment abolishing slavery was added to the United States constitution, a document that, since the founding of the country, had recognized and even promoted slavery.

In the decades preceding the war, however, slavery and the bitter disputes over its place in American society had eaten away at the nation’s soul and raised basic questions about its identity and character.

The U.S. was not the only country with slavery, of course, and various forms of legalized human bondage were common around the world. Koreans themselves had long practiced their own brand of slavery, within a population with no physical differences, while that of the U.S. was based on, and had a lot to do with furthering, the notion of race.

But the two slave systems also shared fundamental features, including hereditary slave status and the treatment of slaves as property to be bought, sold, and bequeathed. And in both cases, the social segregation of slaves was maintained by the “one drop of blood” principle, which came in response to widespread “mixing” through sexual exploitation.

The children of these master-slave unions almost never took the father’s social status, and so their subordinated, stigmatized identity was passed down to their descendants.

Furthermore, most people did not question the propriety of a social order that was based strictly on hereditary difference, an order that seemed logically to support slavery. In the United States before its Civil War, in both the North and the South, almost all white people, whether or not they thought slavery was just, believed in the inherent inferiority of black people.

In premodern Korea as well, the common perspective, especially by those, like slave owners, who benefited from the system, saw slavery as simply the extension of a fundamental principle of dividing society according to birth. And as with the U.S., Korean society came to depend economically on this organized means of human exploitation.

In both societies, however, there also emerged a number of scholars, officials, and others who vehemently condemned slavery on moral and other grounds. And although, unlike in the United States, we have little trace of the voices of the Korean slaves (nobi) themselves, there is plentiful documentary evidence of the demeaning, dehumanizing, and often brutal effects of slavery.

It was not until the Gabo Reform of 1894 that slavery was officially dismantled, however, through a simple yet powerful declaration: “Laws allowing public and private public slavery are completely abolished, and the sale of human beings is forbid- den.” As it turned out, though, this actually did not constitute a sudden or complete change.

In the latter part of the Joseon era, economic trends toward the use of more wage labor made slavery less important, and this paved the way toward incremental improvements, beginning with the elimination of the system of government slaves in the early 19th century.

The official emancipation of all slaves in 1894, then, was largely a symbolic gesture, and it furthermore did not result in the immediate destruction of personal bondage; indeed, especially in the countryside, servile laborers (meoseum) continued to tend to their masters until the middle of the 20th century.

These legal steps of the late 19th century, however, were still significant. Once slavery, bound servitude, and the designation of “mean” or “low-born” people (cheonmin) were eliminated from Korean society, the descendants of slaves enjoyed true social liberation.

Because Korean slavery, though meticulously maintained through record-keeping and other factors, had not depended on physical differences, the increasing urbanization and mobility of the modern era made it very difficult to determine who had slave ancestry. This stood in strong contrast with the United States, where the racial basis for social discrimination remained important for more than a century after the emancipation of the black slaves.

Koreans, however, were not able to escape their own painful processes of overcoming their strong traditions of personal bondage and social discrimination. The lingering power of social status in determining interpersonal relations and access to resources took different forms in the early 20th century, but it probably accounted for the tremendous appeal of communism and other new doctrines.

In this sense, Korea’s own civil war, the Korean War of 1950-53, had more in common with its American counterpart than what appears on the surface.

In South Korea, the effort to overcome the nation’s long legacy of hereditary inequality developed into a growing and fierce insistence on social justice. Combined with other ideologies such as nationalism and democracy, this ideal helped sustain the people’s resistance to dictatorship and to the concentration of economic power.

Still, the opposite tendency also persisted, as some privileged Koreans mistook their inherited economic or social advantages as expressions of some natural or proper order, and they perceived and treated the less privileged people accordingly.

As in the United States, the conflict between these two opposing forces, which in many ways is a continuation of a longer struggle to account for the legacies of slavery, remains central to the drive to forge a better society.