222 SOCIAL REFORMif either one of the parents were commoners. Thus, the only way left to reduce
the number of slaves who inherited slave status was to allow the children of mixed
marriages to inherit either the mother's or the father's status.
Unfortunately, either choice presented problems. The proponents of the
matrilineal rule argued it was better because paternity was difficult to prove, but
they failed to take into account misuse of the law to frustrate the government's
objectives. Furthennore, past experience demonstrated that the matrilineal rule
of 1039 could not be enforced because the aristocratic slaveowners could not
countenance the prospect that their nothoi by slave concubines, and their prog-
eny as well, would be treated as men of base status. Nor did they relish any restric-
tion of opportunities for increasing their slaves through breeding. The real
problem was whether the state had the power to enforce a law contrary to the
interests of the slaveholding class.
The contribution of the Neo-Confucian moralists in the early Choson period
was to argue for adoption of the patrilineal rule of succession in mixed mar-
riages. Although they used the moral argument that all children were obliged to
acknowledge their fathers openly, their primary objective was probably to find
a way to obtain good status for the children of their concubines. Some also
believed that the patrilineal rule would be more effective in increasing the com-
moner population, but their opponents held that greedy slaveowners would sub-
vert the patrilineal law by slyly marrying their male slaves to commoner women
to breed more slaves for themselves. The trouble was that either law was prone
to evasion.^59
In 1397 King T'aejo showed that although he did not want to adopt an explicit
law of patrilineal succession in mixed marriages, he was willing to accommo-
date the yangban by decreeing that their children by slave concubines "be per-
manently released and made good [in statusj."60 Then, in 1414 King T'aejong
adopted a modified version of the patrilineal rule to avoid issuing a direct edict
manumitting the sons of female slaves and men of "good" status by simply
declaring that they would simply assume their father's status.^61
At the very moment that he made this decision, however, he also made the
startling announcement that there basically had been no base persons in Korea
until the Koryo government decided to make all offspring of mixed marriages
slave through the matrilineal succession law (of 1039), which only increased
the slave population and reduced the number of commoners. Despite his appar-
ent distaste for Koryo practice, however, he was not sufficiently moved to decree
the outright abolition of slavery, presumably because he was not willing to chal-
lenge the class of slaveholders.^62
In 1429 State Councilor Maeng Sasong and other high officials complained
that the existing law permitted female slaves to marry commoner men but pro-
hibited male slaves from marrying commoner women, indicating that T'aejong's
patrilineal rule of 1414 was not intended to condone inter-status marriage of all
types. Maeng went on to say that as a consequence of the new rule slave women
were making false claims that the fathers of their children were of good status