Lincoln ended slavery in America, not the president but the movie. It inspired Ranjan Batra, an immigrant from India, to learn more about the 13th Amendment.
“At the end of the story there was an open question about how the ratification process proceeded,” he told ABC News. “Living in the South as I do, I found that a pretty big open question.”
Batra discovered a serious clerical error on usconstitution.net.
“Mississippi ratified the amendment in 1995, but because the state never officially notified the U.S. Archivist, the ratification is not official,” notes an asterisk next to the state.
Delbert Hosemann, the current Secretary of State, corrected the mistake on February 7, 2013.
“I was very surprised that this, had somehow, in a previous administration, somewhere had fallen through the cracks and this is long overdue,” Hosemann told WREG. “As I checked with the National Archives and the rest of ‘em, I noticed it had not been filed and I prepared the necessary filing and submitted the 13th amendment and Mississippi was the 36th state to ratify the 13th amendment.”
The remaining states didn’t achieve statehood until after slavery ended.
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