Election Protection in the Midterms—Plus, Slaves Escaping by Sea

Jon Wiener: From The Nation  magazine, this is Start Making Sense. I’m Jon Wiener. Later in the show: for Black History month, we have a terrific new book shows that a large proportion of slaves who escaped from slavery in the South escaped not on foot, but by boat. Marcus Rediker tells their story –  his new book is Freedom Ship: The Uncharted History of Escaping Slavery by Sea.  But first: Election Protection in the midterms – and we remember Jesse Jackson, who died on Tuesday.  Harold Meyeson will explain – in a minute.
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First up, today’s political update with Harold Meyerson. Of course, he’s editor at large of The American Prospect. Harold, welcome back.

Harold Meyerson: Always good to be here, Jon.

JW: Trump on Friday wrote on Truth Social that “there will be voter ID for the midterm elections, whether approved by Congress or not!” And then in a subsequent post he wrote that if Democrats in the Senate block the Republican bill passed by the house, which requires voter ID at polling places, he will issue an executive order imposing a nationwide photo ID requirement for voting. He will also require showing proof of citizenship at registration, and also, a ban on voting by mail in the 2026 midterms. Is any of that legal?

Harold Meyerson: The short answer is no. Election administration is relegated to the states by the Constitution, and I don’t think the President has any power to do any of the things that Donald Trump suggests. Maybe, speaking as a resident of the District of Columbia, maybe he has that power in the District of Columbia because we are subservient to the federal government and fundamentally lack home rule. Of course, the District of Columbia is 95% Democratic A and B, its member of Congress doesn’t have voting rights anyway, so that would be, I think that that is sort of the platonic ideal of a pyric victory. If Trump can do that in DC, I don’t think any court will allow him to do that, though anyplace else.

JW: Of course, Trump says lots of things. He said, we’ll, invade Greenland. He said, we’ll impose tariffs of 50% on the countries he doesn’t like. And he said, we’ll have voter ID for the midterms. Is voter ID at the midterms just another one of those things he says, like invading Greenland?

HM: Well, in fact, what can happen is that red states have the power, although this would be contested in the courts to require some kind of ID in their own elections, they do have that power. That’s still not his call. That’s up to the states. And even there, it would be contested in court, I don’t doubt.

JW: So the problem for Trump is pretty clear to everybody. His first year has been a disaster for him politically. His approval ratings have crashed with voters everywhere. They’ve had a chance to vote, have rejected his candidates often by very large margins. It’s not hard to see why he said he would cut prices. He didn’t. He said he would bring great industrial jobs. He didn’t. He said he would release the Epstein files. How has that worked out?

HM: That worked out in a way that people know there have been major redactions when they refer to Trump and his intimates. And so that is a controversy that has not gone away, but beyond what he hasn’t done, what he has done is stirred up a level of civic disorder and concern over his own authoritarian grasps for power, that that has engendered a further backlash. It’s not just his sins of omission, it’s very much also his sins of commission.

JW: And part of that turns out to be sending ICE to Minneapolis. Immigration was one of the few issues that he pulled well on in his first month in office. Minneapolis showed the dark side to put it mildly of what he is capable of. And the result is there’s now been an outpouring of public opinion against ICE, against going after law abiding immigrants. Now people say immigrants help America, immigrants are good for America. So we go into the midterm season with everything being about Trump and everything about Trump being a failure or worse, he can see how big his losses are likely to be.
I just want to ask though, it’s typical that a new president loses his first midterm. Trump did everything he could to pass everything he wanted in his first two years. He’s largely succeeded at doing that. He’s done a huge amount of what he wanted to do, demolishing the New Deal order, crippling government regulations. Why does he really care about losing the House and maybe even the Senate?

HM: Well, for one thing, the House could by simple majority vote, impeach him yet again. And it can certainly hold hearings, which would, to put it mildly, embarrass the administration by bringing to light all sorts of scandals, which we already know something about, but not everything. And then some scandals, which we don’t know anything about yet. So it would be a real obstacle politically and not just to him, but to the Republican party generally to have this stuff washed in public and also imperils a large number of his appointees who have been abusing power while in office.

JW: So what can he do to undermine the Democratic vote? Right now, he is attacking the Democratic vote on two fronts. There is the Save Act. This is the law that the House passed, which requires voter ID. He is not allowed by the Constitution to impose voter ID by executive order. Congress does have the power to pass some regulations about voting. They passed motor voting as we’ve noted before, and Congress, the House has passed the Save Act. It is now going to the Senate.
Democrats there say that–what did Chuck Schumer say? “The bill is dead on arrival.” But there is at least one way that the Republicans can get around this. They could abolish the filibuster, which is the Democrats weapon for stopping this. The current Senate Republican leadership doesn’t want to do that, but Trump is putting a lot of pressure on them to change the filibuster rules to pass the Save Act. So it’s not exactly a done deal that the Save Act is dead on arrival.

HM: It’s not. No, you’re right. It’s not clear to me that you could get a majority of the Senate to vote for getting rid of the filibuster. However, it doesn’t seem to me that that would be a very politic thing for a Susan Collins or a Lisa Murkowski to vote for. I can’t imagine Mitch McConnell voting for that. The majority leader John Thune has said he’s against it. And I think that having the filibuster and axing the filibuster is a classic double-edged sword. If it helps one party now, it is bound to help the other party at the expense of that initial one party in the future. And so if there are institutionalists in the Senate, and we know there are some even among Republicans as well as Republicans who have an identity as a moderate, it’s not clear that they can get that support.

JW: And there’s one other possibility. There is some talk among Republicans about attaching the Save Act requiring voter ID to the budget reconciliation bill, which can pass with 51 votes. Now they’re not supposed to do this. Can they do this? Could they do this?

HM: Well, that would be up to the Senate parliamentarian who in the past has assumed that his or her job required striking from reconciliation bills, anything with an impact on the budget. Well, now everything has an impact on the budget, but the parliamentarians have generally been pretty rigorous about enforcing that. And that would remain to be seen. And then you would have the same issue that I just cited. Would you get 51 Republicans to vote for the budget reconciliation if it included the Save Act in it? I am not sure.

JW: The other front direct physical intimidation at the polling places by ICE. This was proposed by Steve Bannon who said on his podcast earlier this month, the administration will have ICE agents “surround the polls.” And when Trump’s press secretary Karoline Leavitt was asked about this, she refused to rule it out as a possibility. So maybe this could really happen. What do you think?

HM: Well, unlike the other things we’ve been discussing that doesn’t require an act of Congress, I think what will have to happen here is that Democrats will be going to the courts arguing that deploying ICE around polling places inhibits Americans right to vote. And it would behoove them to have courts issue such rulings for bidding such ICE deployments before election day, because if they wait until those deployments pop up on election day, by the time the courts rule, it might be election night already.

JW: You are right. The Voting Rights Act makes voter intimidation a federal crime. So sending ICE to blue polling places is pretty clearly an effort at voter intimidation. Bannon has said pretty much the same thing. It also turns out there’s a law, I’ve studied this a little bit. There’s a law that makes it a federal crime punishable by five years in prison for any federal officer to send “armed men to a polling place” unless it is necessary to “repel armed enemies.” Perhaps you weren’t aware of this. I certainly wasn’t.

HM: I wasn’t. When was that law enacted?

JW: It’s a Civil War era law, often referred to as the Armed Men at Polls law. It’s being brought up now by Blue State Attorneys General who are sending copies of it to remind the president and federal agency heads that sending armed immigration officers to a polling site isn’t just a controversial political move, it is a felony that carries a lifetime ban from federal service as well as a five-year prison term.
So the Blue State Attorney Generals and the Blue State Secretaries of State who actually conduct the elections have been preparing for all of these possibilities for months, even for years, and they’ve done quite a bit. First of all, there’s a great idea to put into the state constitutions a right to vote that does not mandate voter ID. This would make any effort by Congress, contrary to state constitutions, which is something that courts are very respectful about, especially state courts. They’re also seeking to pass laws, making sure that the certification of state results is a mandatory duty in case, as in was the case in a few red states, officials refuse to certify Democrats as the winners.
There’s also this concern about the security of the actual ballots and the voting machines. They’re passing laws to protect that.
There are also laws on the books now broadening the already existing exclusions zones around polling places — who can be within a hundred feet of a polling place. California, New York and Washington have banned anyone who was not a authorized person from being within a hundred feet of a polling place, and that includes federal agents who do not have court warrants to be present in those places.
And they’re also worried about intimidation of poll workers. And many states are now passing laws to pay salaries to volunteer poll workers. It used to be something that the League of Women Voters did.
There is also some concern that Steve Bannon’s proposal is intended mostly as intimidation ahead of time rather than an actual physical presence that people will just be discouraged and not show up just in case. And to counter that, states are emphasizing that local and state police will be present to protect voters, that the buffer zone laws will be enforced. Know-your-rights kind of trainings for ordinary people: You have a right to go to the polling place, you have a right to vote by mail.
So this is something that the Democratic state governments have been working on for a long time. My question for you is this is all about the Blue States. What about Houston or Atlanta or Miami? What will happen to blue cities in red states if some of these initiatives are undertaken?

HM: They are obviously more at risk for all kinds of Republican voter obstruction tactics. They can go to court, and they may get some rulings in their favor, but if they’re contesting state law, they have to begin in state courts, which in red states might not exactly be favorable to them.

JW: Now, maybe I’m being too optimistic here, but I think the most likely thing is not physical confrontations with Trump’s ICE forces at polling places, but more a lot of noise and threats in the weeks and days leading up to election day to try to discourage Democrats from voting.

HM: That’s true, but the Republicans are not the only entity that can make noise. And I suspect there’ll be massive Democratic “you have the right to vote” messaging going on as well.
Look, one thing we know so far since Trump’s been president for the second time is that he is the greatest instigator of Democratic turnout or of independent turnout to vote against him and his agents as well. So there’s a significant pushback here.

JW: One last thing. Jesse Jackson died Tuesday, civil rights pioneer, two-time presidential candidate, founder of the Rainbow Push Coalition, ran for president in the Democratic primaries in 84 and 88, challenging not only the Reaganites, but really the Clintonian wing of the Democratic Party, which was launching itself in that period. Where do you see Jesse Jackson’s place in American political history?

HM: Well, Jackson always concluded his speeches, which were invariably rousing with the phrase, “keep hope alive.” And when we look at that as a statement within the context of American history, we can interpret that as what you say after the fading of the 1960s left, but before the rise of the new economic left, which we might date say to the Occupy Wall Street movement of 2011.
Jesse Jackson was in many ways the leading American leftist in the almost half century of neoliberalism, running amuck. And he did keep hope alive, and he did that by being a tribune for not just racial justice but economic justice. I spoke earlier today to my friend Jo-Ann Mort, who in the 1980s and 90s was a communications director of the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union who recalled a tour of textile towns in the South and the Carolinas and elsewhere with Jesse Jackson banging the drum both for the Rainbow Coalition and for unionizing the textile plants, speaking everywhere, high school stadiums, churches, daycare centers, you name it. Even before there was Bernie showing up at every campaign for worker justice, there was Jesse who did a great job of that throughout his entire career. I mean, like Walt Whitman, he contained multitudes. He sought donations from corporations even while disparaging corporate power, rightly so. But he really is a crucial link between different eras when there was a vibrant American left and he did keep that left alive and keep hope alive throughout his long and storied career.

JW: Jesse Jackson – he kept hope alive. Harold Meyerson wrote about Jesse Jackson at The American Prospect. You can read it @prospect.org. Harold, thanks for speaking with us today.

HM: Always good to be here, Jon.
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Jon Wiener: February is Black History Month, and today we have a great new book about Black history to talk about: Freedom Ship by Marcus Rediker. The Underground Railroad is one of the best-known institutions of America before the Civil War, with the indelible image of the escaped slave running through the woods towards freedom. But Marcus argues that that image is misleading. It ignores the fact that a large proportion of slaves escaped not on foot, but by boat. Marcus Rediker teaches at the University of Pittsburgh where he’s distinguished Professor of Atlantic history. He’s also the award-winning author of the books The Slave Ship and The Amistad Rebellion. His new book is Freedom Ship: The Uncharted History of Escaping Slavery by Sea. Marcus, welcome to the program.

Marcus Rediker: Great to be with you, Jon. Thank you.

JW: Slaves escaping from slavery and people helping them were a key reason why the slave states went to war against the Union. In 1860, there were 4 million enslaved people in the United States that was about 12% of the total population, a third of the total population of the South, and about half of them worked growing cotton. They produced an incredible 2 billion pounds of cotton in the 1850s, and that cotton got to cotton mills mostly by ship. And you have some startling statistics about how big the world of seaborne shipping was in the middle of the 19th century, and even more amazing how many of the sailors were African Americans.

MR: What I discovered in writing Freedom Ship is that there really was a maritime system that underlay this circuit of escape because these northern ships, overwhelmingly northern ships, about 80% of the ships that arrived in southern ports were owned by northern merchants, and a very large number of them would sail from say, New York to Charleston or from Philadelphia to Norfolk, and then come back to the same port. So it turns out the structure of escape is based on the structure of trade. You have these sailors, you write a very significant minority of these sailors on these northern ships where African American, they come back to the same southern ports time and time again. They develop relationships of trust with the enslaved people there, especially those who work on the docks. That includes not only sailors, but dock workers and market women. And this is the way that lots of people made it to freedom by developing a relationship with these maritime workers who then helped them to get aboard a safe ship and escape to the North.

JW: Historians estimate that a total of about a hundred thousand enslaved people escaped to freedom. How many people do you think escaped by sea?

MR: The truly successful escape left no documentation, so it’s a figure that we can never really know. But my estimates are that somewhere between 15,000 and 20,000 escaped by sea from these southern ports to these northern ports. And here’s another point to add: if you were escaping by land–and many thousands of people did that–you ran the risk of being arrested by any white person at any time. If you are considered suspicious and if you’re unknown, you’re automatically suspicious, they’re deputized to arrest you and take you to a local jail. Once you get on a ship, especially if you do so with the assistance of a sailor or a group of sailors, or in some cases even the captain, your likelihood of making it to the northern port is vastly greater. And therefore, once you reach that port, you’re much more likely to get away permanently than if you go by land. The key here is, again, it’s the working relationships on the waterfront. These are people who work together loading and unloading ships, sailing ships, and that made possible this. It’s kind of a horizontal or class relationship that leads to freedom, unlike manumission, which is vertical.
And here, Jon, is one more point: Most of the histories of the Underground Railroad are meant to glorify the white abolitionists. My book emphasizes the initiative of the enslaved themselves and those working people who help them.  Crucial to know that, if white abolitionists got involved at all in this circuit of escape, it was at the very end, after the escapees have borne all the risk.  You’re going to pay with the flesh off your back if this fails after sailors have put themselves in a great deal of danger. Some sailors went to prison for this. And at the end, and very importantly, the organizations like the Vigilance Committees, which had, by the way, both Black and white abolitionists would get involved and provide food and shelter and some notion of security, maybe helping people to find jobs. So I just want to make sure that people understand we are talking about self-emancipation from below.

JW: The most celebrated case of self-emancipation from below is of course Frederick Douglas, who escaped from slavery in Maryland in 1838, made it to New York City, traveling by sea for part of that trip. Tell us about the escape of Frederick Douglass.

MR: Well, Douglass, of course, has written these three great autobiographies, and in all of them, he emphasizes that his move to Baltimore opened the way to all success he had for the rest of his life. And more specifically, it was the waterfront of Baltimore. This is where he meets those two Irish sailors when he’s about 11 or 12 years old, and he helps them unload stone from a small vessel, just kind of lending a hand of solidarity. And once they’re finished, they take an interest in him and they say, “Are you a slave for life?” And Frederick says, “Yes, I am.” And they say, “Well, you could escape to the North, there another life for you is possible.” Douglass was too young actually to run away at this time, but he said that was the moment when he first decided that he was going to run away, this conversation with two Irish sailors. Everything about Douglass’ life in a way revolves around the water. It’s how he learned to read. He would stand gazing out up on Chesapeake Bay and see these sails, white sails of the vessels. He’d call them “freedom’s swift-winged angels” — a beautiful piece of writing there. So yes, he made his way partly by sea, then he went from New York to New Bedford. But I think this is really a key to understanding him. He’s a man of the waterfront. When he did escape, he dressed as a sailor, he borrowed a sailor’s protection certificate from a Black sailor who was a friend of his man named Stanley. So he could walk the walk and talk the talk, and he basically acted as a sailor and managed to win his freedom that way.

JW: And let’s talk about Harriet Jacobs, author of “Incidents in the life of a Slave Girl” who had been enslaved in North Carolina. She came from a seagoing family. It turns out three of her uncles were sailors. Tell us about her escape.

MR: She’s one of the most fascinating escapees, and that story is of course well known. But I think what I’ve emphasized about it is that she led this lifelong struggle to escape this man named James Norcom, Dr. James Norcom, who threatened sexual assault against her her entire life, from the time she was 10, 12 years old, and she was determined to escape him. She ended up hiding in her grandmother’s attic for many years, waiting for the opportunity to escape. But when the time came, it was her uncles. She had three uncles who were all sailors. Her uncle Joseph was her favorite, he was a maritime escapee three different times. One time he was captured and brought back and threatened again, but he did finally make it to New York. And then he went, we think to the Mediterranean. And then there was Uncle Mark Ramsey, who actually was the one who made arrangements with a northern ship captain to pick her up and take her first to Philadelphia. And then she went on. She traveled then on to New York. But what she was, Jon, she was a vector of knowledge about the particular experience of women under slavery. And many male abolitionists were very sheepish about this, they didn’t really want to talk about some of the more horrific sexual assaults. But when Harriet Jacobs published “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl” in 1861, that just blew this topic up. And so, hers is one of the most courageous stories. She too, like Frederick Douglass dressed as a sailor disguised to herself as a sailor to make it to the waterfront and the sea as a place of freedom is a very important part of her story.

JW: Well, Frederick Douglas and Harriet Jacobs are well-known. I had never heard of William Powell who turned out to be one of my favorite people in your book. He and his wife ran something called the Colored Seamen’s Boarding House in New York City. Tell us about him.

MR: Yeah, he is a fascinating figure. And I’ll just first mention Jon, why I was able to write about him. He was a working-class man. He was a sailor for many years. And then he opened the boarding house first in New Bedford and then in New York. He didn’t write any books. He didn’t leave any papers. But it turns out he was a vigorous correspondent with abolitionist newspapers. And so using that remarkable thing called the keyword search engine, I was able to find a lot of articles that he wrote, and it turns out they are fascinating.
Powell basically operated with the assistance of the Methodist Missionary Society, this sailors’ home, for Black sailors, but only Black sailors did not stay there, white sailors stayed there too, those were abolitionist principles. But what he did was transform that institution into a hidden kind of abolitionist organization, because Black sailors who are deeply involved in bringing fugitives to the North would take someone right off the ship to the colored sailors’ boarding home. They actually would look sort of similar. Their clothes are tattered. They walk in, William Powell greets them. And so he gives them clothing, he gives them food, he gives them a place to stay all for no money if they don’t have it. And then he will help the fugitive to get a job at sea. It was also like a union hall, actually, this colored sailors’ boarding house.
So Powell is one of these really important rank and file Black abolitionists who have never received the kind of attention they deserve, but who are absolutely critical in this system of escape. And he worked in this much of his life. He himself probably was involved in freeing, helping to free 2000, 2,500 people. 

JW: Amazing. Well, big picture here you said one of the great advantages of escape by sea was that in many ways it was safer than spending a long days, weeks walking through the woods. And of course, it was much faster than travel by foot, which meant you could escape from much deeper into the slave South, South Carolina and Georgia. Whereas most people who went through the woods over land came from border states. The great disadvantage of escape by sea was that it was a lot easier to hide in the woods than in the small confines of a boat. So how did fugitives hide given the difficulties of life in a small boat?

MR: So there would be special hidden away chambers in the hold of the ship, and a few abolitionist ship captains actually had special bulkheads created that would allow them to hide people below decks. We even have instances–there was a man named James Fountain, who was based in Wilmington, Delaware, who made many, many trips and smuggled many fugitives back to the North; sSo much so that he became sort of suspect in the eyes of enslavers, especially in Norfolk, where he tended to dock. And he once had the mayor of Norfolk come aboard and start breaking up the deck of the ship when he had 21 people hidden away below. He managed to bluff his way out of it. But here’s why it really matters that you do this with the help of a crew member, right? Because it’s true, these voyages from a place like Norfolk to Philadelphia that may take a week, but somebody’s got to feed you and somebody’s got to provide water, somebody’s got to care for you.
So there are a few people who slipped in on their own without any member of the crew knowing about it. Those frequently went wrong because people then had to come out of hiding, and they might be taken back to the port where they had boarded the ship. But it’s just this system of solidarity. And the way it worked is frequently a sailor or two or three who would help someone stow away, would then get them ashore and basically hand them off to other sailors, saying “take this man to so-and-so. Take this man to this place, to this place.” So there’s actually an entire circuit of sailors who have sympathies for these kinds of fugitives, and that matters on both the ship. And once they get ashore in the North.

JW: Of course, the southern states did their best to stop slave escapes by sea. You call them their “escape prevention strategies” that were harsh and punitive, but enforcement was always a problem for the slave powers in the South. Tell us about that.

MR: Well, you can imagine that the ruling classes and the municipal authorities in these southern port cities are absolutely driven mad by this, that people keep escaping and keep escaping, and they know that this is happening. So they do everything they can to prevent it. They set up special guards and patrols on the docks.
The first American police forces are developed in port cities. They’re policing the docks against this kind of thing, and lots of other things going on. But they would even go so far as to fumigate the vessels. They’d take a piece of sulfur and throw it in a bucket and burn it so that the smoke would suffuse the entire hold of the ship. And if someone was down there, they’d come coughing out, up the ladder. But people found ways to defeat that too. The state of Virginia developed a very complex and expensive ship inspection system where they literally had inspectors going on ships in all of the major points of departure. And that didn’t work either. So it’s kind of maddening. But here’s the contradiction, the fatal contradiction for the southern slave owning ruling class, they depended on northern shipping to make money. They depended on these northern merchants. And so consequently, these vessels come in and they’ve got to do business with them. Now, these vessels represent a completely different kind of labor system. You’ve got free workers here. When Black workers, Black sailors step off the ship, they are a symbol of exactly what everybody wants.
One more very important thing that southern authorities did was to try to criminalize the contact between Black sailors on these northern ships and the people who worked on the dock, the enslaved or free Black people in all of these southern ports. These were called the Negro Seamen Acts, and it began in South Carolina in 1822. But every southern port had such a thing at its disposal. And what this meant was they would try to isolate these Black sailors when they sailed into port, put them literally in a kind of quarantine, and allow them to leave only the day before the ship was to head back north. This too didn’t work. A lot of white sailors helped the enslaved people get on board. Some people waited until those final 24 hours and brought people on board, when they were supposed to be there, checking the cargo, and doing this, doing that. So I am very impressed by the way in which the determination of southern authorities to eliminate escape by sea was never equal to the political will of the enslaved to be free.

JW: We said at the outset that the proportion of slaves who escaped from slavery was not large. Nevertheless, the issue of fugitive slaves in free states was a key reason why the slave south went to war. As you said, they were obsessed with this. And in South Carolina’s Declaration of Secession in 1860, the longest complaint was that the Constitution’s fugitive slave clause had been “rendered useless,” that’s a quotation, by popular resistance in the free states. Eric Foner wrote about your book in The New York Review. He concludes, “How appropriate that the Civil War began in Charleston Harbor, where the irrepressible conflict between freedom and slavery had long been fought on the docks piled high with bales of cotton, and on the ships that daily sailed past the looming presence of Fort Sumpter, some of them carrying hidden fugitives on their way to freedom” – Eric Foner, The New Yorker Review. Marcus Rediker’s new book is Freedom Ship: The Uncharted History of Escaping Slavery by Sea. Marcus, thanks for talking with us today.

MR: My pleasure, Jon.