Welcome to Daily TWiP, your daily dose of all the holidays and history we couldn’t cram into The Week in Preview.

With all the paperwork that accumulates during the legislative process – petitions and bills and whatnot – it seems inevitable that a few things might get overlooked. That appears to have been the case when Mississippi finally ratified the 13th Amendment today (March 16th) in 1995.

The 13th Amendment was proposed Jan. 31, 1865, and abolished slavery and involuntary servitude (except as a criminal punishment) and empowered Congress to pass legislation to enforce the amendment.

Like other states whose economies were rooted in slavery, Mississippi was not keen on ratifying an amendment that would take away a sizable chunk of its workforce, not to mention the effects the amendment would have on its society and culture.

Three-fourths of the states needed to ratify the amendment before it could become part of the US Constitution, and that percentage was achieved without Mississippi’s assistance. Once Georgia’s legislature said “yea” on Dec. 6, 1865, the 13th Amendment was official.

During the hustle and bustle of Reconstruction (and indeed, most of the 20th century), the fact that Mississippi had yet to ratify the 13th Amendment seems to have been put on the political back burner.

In 1994, Gregory Watson, a clerk in the Texas legislature, discovered while researching other projects that Mississippi still hadn’t ratified the 13th Amendment. He mailed letters stating as much to all of the African-American members of the Mississippi legislature, along with a draft of a resolution that Mississippi could adopt in order to rectify the situation.

This time around, the only opposition the ratification encountered was from legislators who considered the action unnecessary because it was already part of the US Constitution. On March 16, 1995, 130 years after it was initially proposed, Mississippi happily ratified the 13th Amendment, becoming the final state to do so.

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– Teresa Santoski