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JACKSON, Miss. — Though the 13th Amendment was ratified and adopted in 1865, it took some states quite a while to actually get around to ratifying the document banning slavery and involuntary servitude. No state took longer than Mississippi, though, which finally made the ratification official Feb. 18, thanks to an apparent clerical error that delayed the official ratification some 18 years.
"We're very deliberate in our state," state Sen. Hillman Frazier, D-Jacksontold the Clarion-Ledger. "We finally got it right."
The mistake [caught the attention](<<a href=>) of a neurobiology professor at the University of Mississippi after he saw the widely-acclaimed movie "Lincoln." Dr. Ranjan Batra went to the website usconstitution.net, seeking to learn more about the Amendment and its history. A native of India, Batra had been a citizen only since 2008.
There, he noticed what proved to be a very important asterisk, pointing to a note which read: "Mississippi ratified the amendment in 1995, but because the state never officially notified the US Archivist, the ratification is not official."
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A look at the past through the eyes of Spielberg's 'Lincoln'
Steven Spielberg's newest movie "Lincoln" is being called the film of the year. "Lincoln" has been one of the most anticipated films in years. Spielberg purposely did not release the movie until after the election because of its political tone. But he believes most people will see it because of our shared fascination with the country's 16th president.Batra's friend Ken Sullivan checked with the archivist and learned that the note was accurate. So Sullivan set to work correcting the mistake.
In 1995, Mississippi's legislature voted unanimously to ratify the 13th Amendment formally, with a few abstentions. Kentucky was the most recent state to ratify the amendment, in 1976, with Delaware doing so in 1905.
Mississippi's 1995 resolution called for the Secretary of State to inform the federal archivist of the ratification. But this never happened, despite the vote.
18 years later, Sullivan contacted the Mississippi Secretary of State, Delbert Hosemann, and informed him of the problem. He quickly filed the paperwork with the Office of the Federal Register.
On Feb. 7, it became official: "With this action, the State of Mississippi has ratified the 13th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States," stated a letter sent back to Hosemann,confirming the ratification.
The ratification brings to a close the fight to pass the amendment, a fight dramatized extensively in Steven Spielberg's film "Lincoln."
