As you watched President Lincoln on screen go through painstaking efforts in order to have the thirteenth amendment passed in Congress, you probably thought that particular part of history is long behind us. After all, the events portrayed in the film happened nearly 150 years ago. Well, that’s not quite the case, as University of Mississippi associate professor Dr. Ranjan Batra discovered soon after watching the film.
According to the Jackson Clarion Ledger, Dr. Batra was researching online what had happened when the states voted on ratifying the thirteenth amendment when he discovered that Mississippi never officially ratified it. Apparently, Mississippi voted to ratify the amendment back in 1995, but because they never notified the US Archivist, the vote never became official. So, Dr. Batra talked to fellow colleague, Ken Sullivan, regarding the matter and Sullivan took it upon himself to contact the National Archives’ Office of the Federal Register only to learn that Dr. Batra’s findings were indeed correct.
After Ken Sullivan was moved to tears when he went to a screening of Steven Spielberg's “Lincoln” with his wife that weekend, he took it upon himself to make sure that his states’ ratification of the amendment became official. After contacting the state’s Secretary of State in order to file the necessary paperwork that was involved, on February 7th, the director of the Federal Register made it official: the state of Mississippi finally ratified the 13th Amendment of the United States.
While it’s certainly confounding that it took this long for the state of Mississippi to finally ratify the amendment, at least we can take comfort in the fact that this part of history is now 100% behind us. For real this time. [via Cinema Blend]