404 MILITARY REFORM
vide adequate salaries to these petty clerks and runners, and prohibit the use of
soldiers as runners or slaves.^25
Yu's description of the corruption of the system of cloth support taxes was
even more tragic because it was not new; it was certainly a continuation, if not
exacerbation, of the situation that had left the Korean garrisons empty of real
troops when Hideyoshi's men first landed on Korean shores in 1592. Kings
Kwanghaegun, lnjo, and Hyojong had failed to correct the situation.Military Service for SlavesThe exclusion of slaves from military service prior to Hideyoshi's invasions was
probably the major reason for the shortage of eligible male recruits prior to 1592.
That problem had been remedied to some extent by the enlistment of private
slaves in special sog(lgun units that originally mixed both slaves and common-
ers together, but that solution was resisted by the slaveowners who sought to
regain exclusive control over the labor power of their slaves. The state, how-
ever, was not willing to give up its military service requirement for slaves. They
had become essential for filling the ranks following the decrease in the number
of commoner adult males cligible for service because of the conuption of the
military registration and service system.
Yu noted that prior to Hideyoshi's invasions the number of regular duty sol-
diers plus support personnel was not quite 400,000, of which 180,000 men were
regular duty soldiers, both cavalry and infantry, but when the Japanese landed
at Pusan in 1592, most of the regular troops scattered to the winds.^26 Yi Sug-
wang's Chibong yusi51 of 1614 recorded pre-Hideyoshi troop strength at less
than the 200,000 men registered under King Kongmin of Koryo in the 1360s,
and Yi attributed the cause to "too many sajok [families of scholar-officials,
i.e., yangban], idlers and vagrants, and too few people liable for service."27
Yu Hyongwon found that according to the records of the Ministry of War the
number of registered males of "good" or commoner status in 1660 consisted of
only 66,702 regular infantry and cavalry duty soldiers and 132,160 support tax-
payers, a grand total of 183,258 men.^28 In addition, there were 161,929 sogo-
gun soldiers, 47 percent of the total number of males in the army.29 Since sogo
units combined slaves and commoners, one could not conclude that all these
troops were slaves in 1660, but the percentage of slaves in the armed forces must
have been considerable, probably more than the 30 percent in the general pop-
ulation, because commoners had been evading association with slaves in the sogo
units. A recent estimate of the percentage of slave duty soldiers and support tax-
payers (pain) in some select units in the late eighteenth century was that about
25-30 percent of those units consisted of private slaves, most of whom were
outside resident slaves who paid support taxes in lieu of duty.3^0
Yu could not have advocated a return to the early Choson practice of exempt-
ing them from duty without drastically weakening the national defense, but he
might well have called for immediate abolition of slavery, for manumitted slaves