Slavery was abolished in Mississippi through a sequence of overlapping actions between 1863 and 1865, not on a single date. President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation declared enslaved people in Mississippi free on January 1, 1863, but it had little effect until Union troops could enforce it. Mississippi rewrote its own constitution in August 1865 to prohibit slavery, and the 13th Amendment made abolition the supreme law of the land on December 18, 1865. Mississippi’s legislature actually rejected the 13th Amendment that same year, didn’t vote to ratify it until 1995, and didn’t file the paperwork until 2013.
January 1863: The Emancipation Proclamation
Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, declaring that all people held as slaves in states then in rebellion “are, and henceforward shall be free.”1National Archives. Emancipation Proclamation (1863) Mississippi was named explicitly in the order.2Avalon Project. Emancipation Proclamation Because the Confederacy controlled the state, however, the decree couldn’t be enforced where it mattered most. For enslaved people in Mississippi’s interior, daily life didn’t change.
That shifted as Union forces pushed through the state during the Vicksburg Campaign. The Confederate surrender at Vicksburg on July 4, 1863, gave the Union control of the Mississippi River and opened large portions of the state to federal authority.3U.S. National Park Service. Surrender (July 4) – Vicksburg National Military Park As Union soldiers occupied towns and counties, enslaved people fled behind federal lines to claim their freedom. Some areas were effectively liberated; others still operated under the old system. The proclamation was a wartime measure designed to weaken the Southern economy, not a permanent constitutional change, and its limits would show once the war ended.
August 1865: Mississippi’s New State Constitution
After the Confederacy’s defeat, President Andrew Johnson required the former rebel states to hold constitutional conventions, draft new governing documents that abolished slavery, and renounce secession before regaining representation in Congress. Mississippi held its convention in August 1865 and revised its constitution to prohibit slavery within the state’s borders for the first time.4Internet Archive. Constitution of the State of Mississippi: As Amended, with the Ordinances and Resolutions Adopted by the Constitutional Convention August, 1865 The delegates acknowledged that the federal government had destroyed the institution by force of arms, and this constitutional change was the price of readmission.
It mattered because it was the first time Mississippi’s own law reflected the end of slavery. Every prior legal prohibition had come from Washington.
December 1865: The 13th Amendment
Congress passed the 13th Amendment on January 31, 1865, permanently abolishing slavery across the entire country.5National Archives. 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: Abolition of Slavery Unlike the Emancipation Proclamation, which was a wartime executive order with a limited legal shelf life, the amendment rewrote the Constitution itself. Ratification required approval by three-fourths of the states, a threshold reached on December 6, 1865. Secretary of State William Seward formally certified the amendment on December 18, 1865, making it binding everywhere.
The amendment’s reach was absolute. It overrode every state law, local ordinance, and constitutional provision that had permitted human ownership. Mississippi hadn’t voted to approve the amendment, but under the Supremacy Clause that didn’t matter. Legal ownership of another person became a federal offense regardless of what Mississippi’s legislature thought.
The amendment did include one exception: involuntary servitude remained legal “as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” That loophole would prove enormously consequential in Mississippi, as the state quickly found ways to funnel freed Black people into the criminal system and back into forced labor.
Abolition on Paper, Control in Practice
Mississippi’s legislature wasted no time exploiting the gap between formal abolition and actual freedom. In late 1865, the state passed a set of laws known as the Black Codes, designed to restrict the movement, labor, and legal rights of formerly enslaved people.
The vagrancy statute was the most blunt instrument. Any Black person over eighteen who lacked proof of employment by the second Monday of January 1866 could be arrested as a vagrant and fined up to fifty dollars. Anyone who couldn’t pay would be hired out by the sheriff at public auction to any white person willing to cover the cost. The “employer” would then deduct the fine from wages, effectively forcing the person back into unpaid labor. The law also authorized any citizen to arrest and return a Black worker who left an employer before the end of a labor contract, with a five-dollar bounty paid for each capture.
A separate apprenticeship law, passed on November 22, 1865, targeted Black children. County officials were required to identify Black minors who were orphans or whose parents were deemed unable to support them. Local courts would then “apprentice” those children to white employers, with terms lasting until age eighteen for girls and twenty-one for boys. Former enslavers received first priority. Children who refused to work or attempted to leave faced criminal punishment, and the law did not require employers to pay them wages.
So while the formal legal date for abolition in Mississippi can be fixed at December 18, 1865, the lived reality for most freed people was that forced labor continued under new names for years, backed by state law.
Why Mississippi’s Ratification Took Until 2013
Mississippi’s legislature voted to reject the 13th Amendment in 1865. Lawmakers objected to what they saw as federal overreach into state authority over property. The rejection was symbolic even at the time, since the amendment was already the law of the land, but it remained the state’s official position on the books for 130 years.
On March 16, 1995, the Mississippi legislature unanimously voted to ratify the 13th Amendment. The vote was intended to correct the historical record, and it drew little attention. Then nothing happened. State officials never sent the required paperwork to the Office of the Federal Register, so the ratification was never officially recorded by the National Archives.
The oversight was discovered in 2012 by Dr. Ranjan Batra, a professor at the University of Mississippi Medical Center. After watching Steven Spielberg’s film Lincoln, Dr. Batra researched the amendment’s ratification history and realized Mississippi’s 1995 vote had never been filed. He connected with a colleague, Ken Sullivan, who had political contacts in the state capital. Sullivan arranged a meeting with Secretary of State Delbert Hosemann, who agreed to submit the paperwork.
The Office of the Federal Register received the resolution and officially recorded Mississippi’s ratification on February 7, 2013.5National Archives. 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: Abolition of Slavery The filing closed a bureaucratic loop that had been open for 148 years. It changed nothing about the law, since the 13th Amendment had applied to Mississippi since 1865 regardless of the state’s vote.