KOLUMN Magazine
In the popular telling, Mississippi’s ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment is an American oddity: a factoid, a late-night punchline, an irresistible morsel of civic shame. The story is usually summarized in a breath—Mississippi “finally” ratified the amendment abolishing slavery nearly a century and a half after the Civil War—and then, for extra absurdity, didn’t finish the paperwork until 2013, reportedly after someone watched Lincoln and started asking questions.
But the protracted timeline is not merely a timeline. It is a diagnostic. It shows how a state can live inside the legal architecture of the United States while maintaining, culturally and politically, a different relationship to the meanings embedded in that architecture. The Thirteenth Amendment was national law in December 1865, once the required number of states ratified it and the federal government certified it. Mississippi’s approval was never required for the amendment to take effect. Yet Mississippi’s refusal to ratify for 130 years—and its failure to perfect the ratification it finally adopted—reads less like a procedural glitch than a condensed history of denial: a series of choices, overt and passive, to treat the abolition of slavery not as a moral break but as an imposition to be endured, reinterpreted, and, when possible, administratively postponed.
To understand why the state’s ratification dragged across generations, you have to sit with two distinct but related truths. The first is historical: in the months after the Confederacy’s defeat, Mississippi’s political class—newly restored under President Andrew Johnson’s lenient Reconstruction—moved quickly to reassert white control, and did so through law. The second is contemporary: even in the late twentieth century, long after the Civil Rights Movement forced public accommodations and voting rights into new legal terrain, the state’s political culture retained a deep instinct to avoid official gestures that could be read as moral capitulation. Mississippi’s Thirteenth Amendment saga is, in that sense, not a surprise but a symptom.
The Amendment Mississippi Rejected
The Thirteenth Amendment, in its spare language, prohibits “slavery” and “involuntary servitude,” except as punishment for crime, and gives Congress the power to enforce that prohibition. It emerged from the Civil War as both a constitutional conclusion and a beginning: the formal end of chattel slavery and the legal foundation on which the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments—and federal civil-rights enforcement—would later stand.
Mississippi, however, belonged to a cohort of states that either rejected the amendment or did not act on it during the initial ratification period. In Mississippi’s case, the rejection is dated to December 1865, after the amendment had already become law nationally. The precise reasons offered by lawmakers in that era appear across secondary accounts and reporting: anxiety about federal power, resentment at uncompensated emancipation, and a politics steeped in the belief that slavery was both property and principle. In modern coverage, Mississippi’s early resistance is often described as a posture of bitterness over the loss of “property”—human beings whose “value,” in the logic of the slave economy, was considered a compensable asset.
The deeper context is what Mississippi did next. The state’s relationship to the Thirteenth Amendment cannot be separated from the legal regimes it built in the immediate wake of emancipation. Mississippi was among the first states to enact “Black Codes,” laws designed to regulate Black labor, movement, and daily life under a nominally free status. Historians and teaching archives document how these codes constrained Black autonomy through vagrancy laws, labor-contract requirements, and punitive systems that could force Black people into coerced labor arrangements. The codes were not an accidental afterthought; they were a strategy. If slavery as a formal category could no longer be defended, Mississippi’s political class moved to approximate slavery’s outcomes through different legal machinery.
This is the crucial point: for many white Mississippians in power, the argument was not simply about the Thirteenth Amendment as a text. It was about what the end of slavery would mean in practice. Emancipation threatened wealth, social order, and political control. Rejecting ratification was symbolic, but symbolism mattered—especially in the aftermath of defeat, when symbols offered the consolation of resistance. At the same time, the state worked to ensure that the economic and social dependence of Black labor would persist under new names.
The nation responded. Northern outrage over Black Codes helped accelerate congressional Reconstruction and the push for federal civil-rights enforcement. The Thirteenth Amendment’s enforcement clause, combined with subsequent amendments, became part of the constitutional justification for federal intervention. Yet in Mississippi, the instinct to resist, reinterpret, and delay persisted. Over time it migrated from explicit statutes to institutional practices, from the blunt language of Black Codes to the subtler but no less consequential architectures of segregation, disenfranchisement, and labor exploitation.
Why Ratification Still Mattered—Even After It Didn’t
A reasonable person might ask: if Mississippi’s ratification was never required for the Thirteenth Amendment to become law, why does the state’s late ratification matter at all?
Formally, it didn’t. Constitutionally, the amendment was valid and enforceable nationwide once the required number of states ratified it and the federal government certified it. Mississippi could resist symbolically, but it could not resurrect slavery as a legal institution under federal law.
And yet symbolically, ratification mattered because the state’s refusal signaled something important: an unwillingness to align its self-conception with the moral and constitutional rupture of emancipation. Ratification, even after the fact, is a kind of civic speech act. It communicates whether a state wishes to be seen as consenting to a new constitutional order or merely tolerating it because resistance is futile.
This is one reason the story resonates beyond Mississippi. The United States is a nation where legal change has often outpaced moral reconciliation. Federal law can command, but it cannot compel a collective conscience. Mississippi’s delayed ratification dramatized that gap. It also illustrated how the rituals of governance—votes, resolutions, filings—can function as proxies for deeper conflicts about memory and meaning.
When Mississippi eventually voted to ratify in 1995, it did so in the language of housekeeping and belated propriety. Press coverage at the time described the action as a legislature, without debate, finally approving what had been passed elsewhere generations earlier. The move did not alter anyone’s rights. It did not free a single person. It did not overturn a single discriminatory policy. But it carried a message: Mississippi, at least on paper, was willing to stop being a holdout.
Yet even that message came hedged by time. The state waited 130 years after the amendment’s national adoption to make the gesture. And as later events would show, Mississippi would not even complete the bureaucratic steps necessary to place the gesture beyond dispute.
1995: A Vote Without a Reckoning
The 1995 ratification is often framed as a curiosity: why then, and why so late?
The answer is partly mundane and partly cultural. Legislatures do occasionally take up symbolic measures—resolutions meant to correct, recognize, or commemorate. In 1995, Mississippi lawmakers approved a resolution to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment, an action widely covered as a long-overdue formality. The Washington Post’s archival reporting, via the Associated Press, noted that the Mississippi House approved the measure unanimously after it had passed unanimously in the Senate, emphasizing the absence of debate and the sheer lateness of the moment.
That lack of debate can be read in different ways. In one interpretation, it suggests the issue had become politically safe: few lawmakers wanted to publicly defend the symbolism of rejecting abolition in the late twentieth century. In another, it suggests discomfort: silence as a way to avoid acknowledging what a discussion might require—namely, an honest accounting of Mississippi’s historic role in slavery and the state’s long resistance to civil-rights enforcement.
There is also a strategic dimension. By 1995, Mississippi’s national image—especially as it related to race—was a burden the state’s leadership increasingly wished to manage. The late twentieth century brought new economic imperatives: attracting investment, persuading companies to relocate, projecting stability. Symbolic actions can be part of that effort. They allow a state to signal modernity without engaging in costly structural reforms.
In other words, the 1995 vote could be framed as progress, but it could also be understood as brand management. Mississippi would no longer be the state that “still hasn’t ratified” the amendment abolishing slavery—at least, that was the idea.
Except it wasn’t quite true.
The Clerical Gap: When a Ratification Isn’t “Official”
The twist that made Mississippi’s timeline famous is not the 1995 vote itself but what happened after: nothing, at least in the records that mattered.
Under the procedures governing constitutional amendments, states transmit their ratification documents to federal authorities—specifically, to be received and acknowledged in the national archival and Federal Register system. The point is not to re-litigate whether an amendment is valid, but to maintain official documentation. If the state never transmits the paperwork, the ratification exists as a state action, but the federal record is incomplete.
In Mississippi’s case, the federal record apparently remained marked by an asterisk: the state had voted to ratify, but the ratification had not been properly filed with the U.S. Archivist or processed into official acknowledgment. This is not esoteric trivia; it is the kind of bureaucratic detail that becomes a metaphor when it persists long enough. Mississippi’s ratification lived in the legislative memory but not in the federal ledger.
What finally changed was a chain reaction that began, improbably, with a Hollywood film. Multiple reports describe how academics and citizens, prompted by watching Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln—a dramatization of the political battle to pass the Thirteenth Amendment—looked up the ratification list and noticed Mississippi’s status was still flagged.
The Guardian reported that academics, after noticing the unfinished 1995 action, prompted the correction. NPR coverage similarly described the discovery of the missing official notification and the effort to correct it. The Atlantic, in its characteristically blunt phrasing, framed the lapse as a clerical error with symbolic weight: Mississippi had voted in 1995, but never officially notified the archivist, leaving the state “officially” unaligned with abolition in the paperwork of the nation’s constitutional memory.
At the center of the push was Dr. Ranjan Batra, a professor at the University of Mississippi Medical Center, whose inquiry and persistence became a key part of the public narrative. Media outlets described how Batra and others moved from curiosity to action, contacting state officials and pressing for the formal submission.
The result is documented in a letter dated February 7, 2013, from the Director of the Federal Register, acknowledging receipt of Mississippi’s Senate Concurrent Resolution and confirming that “with this action, the State of Mississippi has ratified the 13th Amendment.” The letter identifies the resolution as adopted by the Mississippi Senate on February 16, 1995 and by the Mississippi House of Representatives on March 16, 1995, and it is addressed to Mississippi Secretary of State Delbert Hosemann.
That letter is the hinge. It marks the moment Mississippi’s belated ratification became, in the federal documentation, complete.
So, yes: the story really does include paperwork. But the paperwork is not merely paperwork. It is a reminder that in governance, moral history is often processed through administrative channels—and that neglect can function like an ideology. A state can avoid an uncomfortable conclusion not only by voting “no,” but by voting “yes” and letting the “yes” sit unfinished long enough to fade into the background noise of bureaucracy.
The Two Delays, and What Each One Means
Mississippi’s Thirteenth Amendment timeline contains two different delays, and each reveals a different layer of the state’s political culture.
The first delay—from 1865 to 1995—was an explicit refusal to ratify. It belongs to the long story of post–Civil War resistance to Black freedom, from Black Codes to Jim Crow to massive resistance during desegregation. It is not unique to Mississippi, but Mississippi’s prominence in the nation’s racial history makes the refusal especially resonant. The delay suggests that, even after slavery’s legal death, Mississippi’s leadership found it important to preserve the posture of dissent.
The second delay—from 1995 to 2013—was administrative, a failure to transmit or perfect the official record. It can be tempting to treat this as a harmless clerical error, a bureaucratic oversight without intent. But this delay is revealing precisely because it shows how indifference can mimic hostility in its outcomes. If the state had truly cared about the symbolic importance of ratification, the paperwork would not have lingered in limbo for eighteen years.
Moreover, the fact that the correction came not from an internal state initiative but from outside prompting—citizens and academics pressing officials after noticing an asterisk—suggests that the state’s institutional incentives did not naturally align toward finishing the task.
Mississippi did not need the Thirteenth Amendment to be valid; it needed it, if at all, as a statement about its identity. And statements about identity are precisely what Mississippi’s modern political culture has often struggled to make, especially when those statements require confronting the past.
“Except as Punishment for Crime”: The Clause That Haunts the Present
Any serious reckoning with the Thirteenth Amendment must engage its exception clause: “except as a punishment for crime.” (Congress.gov) That clause has been central to modern scholarship and activism that argues the amendment abolished slavery in name while leaving open a constitutional pathway for coerced labor through the criminal legal system.
This matters for Mississippi in particular because the state’s post-emancipation economy and social order evolved alongside systems—convict leasing, forced labor, vagrancy enforcement—that used criminal law to rebind Black labor to white control. The Black Codes, including vagrancy laws and labor-contract enforcement, were among the early instruments of that shift. The amendment that ended slavery also contained the seed of a workaround, and the post-war South, including Mississippi, proved adept at exploiting it.
If the Thirteenth Amendment’s ratification story is framed only as a delay in symbolism, it risks obscuring this deeper continuity. The question is not merely when Mississippi officially assented to abolition. The question is how Mississippi—and the nation—reconstructed coercion under new legal categories even as slavery was prohibited.
This is part of why the story continues to attract attention. It points to a broader American pattern: a willingness to declare certain moral transformations complete while tolerating systems that preserve the old hierarchies in new form.
The “Lincoln” Moment, and the Strange Uses of Popular Memory
The role of Lincoln in the 2013 correction is both ironic and instructive. A feature film—an artifact of popular culture—helped trigger a bureaucratic completion of a constitutional gesture the state had left unfinished.
This is not simply a quirky subplot. It illustrates how Americans often encounter civic history: not through textbooks or archives, but through dramatizations. Popular culture can educate, distort, sentimentalize, and simplify. But it can also provoke inquiry. In this case, the film appears to have prompted a viewer to consult the historical record and notice a discrepancy. A narrative about constitutional transformation led to a discovery that, in Mississippi’s case, the transformation remained administratively unresolved.
It also underscores a point about what motivates “symbolic” acts. The state did not suddenly decide, in 2013, to correct the record because of a renewed internal moral urgency. It did so because someone noticed the state looked bad on paper. Public embarrassment—especially the kind that circulates nationally—can be more catalytic than private conscience.
The Politics of Embarrassment
Embarrassment is not trivial in politics. States, like individuals, manage reputations. Mississippi’s national reputation has long been shaped by its role in slavery, segregation, and civil-rights conflict. A lingering failure to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment—and then the discovery that even the late ratification wasn’t “official”—was the kind of story that reinforced the stereotype of Mississippi as a place perpetually out of step with modernity.
Media coverage leaned into that symbolism. The Guardian framed the state’s action as “147 years late.” The Atlantic connected the correction to the “Thanks to ‘Lincoln’” hook, emphasizing the absurdity that a movie helped resolve what government had neglected. NPR described the error and its correction in straightforward terms, but the very premise—an amendment abolishing slavery not being “officially” ratified in Mississippi—carried the sting of reputational damage.
Embarrassment, in other words, became a mechanism of accountability. But it was a narrow accountability, focused on recordkeeping rather than reparative policy. Mississippi could fix the paperwork without fixing the inequities rooted in the institution the amendment abolished.
This is one reason critics of symbolic politics remain skeptical. Symbolic gestures are easy. They cost little. They produce headlines. They allow officials to claim progress. But they can also function as substitutions—public relations for justice.
The State and the Nation: Why This Story Is Bigger Than Mississippi
It is tempting to isolate Mississippi as uniquely backward, a singular outlier clinging to the remnants of slavery longer than any other state. That temptation is understandable; Mississippi’s history provides ample material for condemnation. But focusing exclusively on Mississippi risks missing the broader American truth the story reveals.
Many states resisted the Thirteenth Amendment initially. Others delayed ratification for decades and then ratified long after the amendment became law. Mississippi’s delay was among the longest, but the phenomenon is not confined to Mississippi. The United States has repeatedly treated moral transformation as something that can be declared complete even as states and institutions drag their feet, reinterpret the terms, or comply in form while resisting in practice.
Moreover, the real substance of the Thirteenth Amendment—its promise of freedom from bondage—was contested immediately after ratification. Black Codes, vagrancy laws, convict leasing, racial terror, disenfranchisement, and segregation all functioned, in different ways, to limit Black freedom and maintain racial hierarchy. Mississippi was a central stage for these struggles, but it was not the only one.
The story, then, is not simply about Mississippi’s failure to file paperwork. It is about how the end of slavery became an ongoing political fight: over labor, citizenship, voting rights, policing, prisons, and the very definition of freedom.
A Letter That Closes a File, Not a History
The February 7, 2013 letter acknowledging Mississippi’s ratification is precise, bureaucratic, and almost austere. It names the resolution, the dates of adoption in 1995, and the effect: Mississippi, with this action, has ratified the Thirteenth Amendment.
The letter closes a file. It does not close a history.
That distinction matters. American political life is full of moments when a procedural closure is mistaken for a moral conclusion. The state can say the paperwork is done. The nation can say slavery ended in 1865. Both statements can be true, and still incomplete in what they imply. The afterlife of slavery—economic extraction, social control, racial inequality—does not vanish because the record is stamped and archived.
Mississippi’s timeline is therefore best understood as a layered parable. It shows how resistance can be loud or quiet, how denial can be explicit or administrative, how a state can spend more than a century avoiding a symbolic “yes,” and then spend nearly two decades failing to deliver the proof of that “yes” to the nation’s official memory.
If nothing else, Mississippi’s long road to ratification should caution us against treating history as settled simply because the law is written. The law is the beginning of the argument, not the end.
And in Mississippi—where slavery shaped the land, the economy, the culture, and the political order—the argument has always been about more than a vote. It has been about what kind of state Mississippi is willing to be on the record, and what kind of state it has been in practice.