March 16, 1995. Mississippi became the last American state to ratify the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, which banned slavery.
It all began on May 23, 1861. A few weeks after the outbreak of the American Civil War, three slaves managed to reach Fort Monroe at the mouth of the James River. This northern fort in secessionist Virginia was under the command of General Benjamin Butler, to whom the three fugitives told that they had come to serve in the Confederate army. Contrary to the laws of the time, the general decided not to return them to their master, but to use them as labor - but not as slaves.
It was precisely with the war between the North and the South that the end of the slavery period in American history was associated. In this context, President Abraham Lincoln's declaration of September 22, 1862, in which he threatened the southern states that if they did not join the Union, he would use force to end slavery in them, falls into this context.
Over time, however, more and more slaves managed to escape, Congress and the military came up with their own initiatives, and in July 1862 Lincoln presented to his cabinet a project that for the first time officially mentioned the liberation of slaves from all areas controlled by the Confederate forces. The declaration he issued on January 1, 1863, definitively linked the Civil War to the issue of slavery.
Slavery in America was finally abolished only with the adoption of the 13th additional article to the Constitution, which came into force in December 1865 - 8 months after the end of the war, after it had been ratified by the required three-quarters of all states (27 of the 36 states that existed at that time).
Mississippi, New Jersey, Delaware and Kentucky were among the states that refused to ratify the 13th Amendment. The authorities in New Jersey, for example, quickly changed their position and ratified the document in 1866. Delaware did so in 1901, and Kentucky decades later - in 1976. However, the authorities in Mississippi needed much more time to decide to approve the 13th amendment to the constitution, and the legislature did not adopt it until 1995, and the omission of its registration in the Federal Archives was corrected 18 years later thanks to an Indian.