Seward did not receive the hoped-for answer. It took Mississippi another 130 years to ratify, symbolically, in 1995.
“Congress in February last, by the requisite vote of two-thirds of both houses, passed a resolution proposing an amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which declares that neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as punishment for a crime, whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States… I have to request that Your Excellency will be pleased, to give to this Department as soon as convenient, the official notice contemplated, whenever the Legislature of the State of Mississippi shall have duly ratified the amendment in question....”
Twenty-seven states had to ratify the amendment for it to become part of the Constitution. Secretary of State William H. Seward asks Governor Benjamin G. Humphreys whether Mississippi has yet passed the Thirteenth Amendment. Twenty-four states had already done so, though Seward had received official notifications from only eighteen at that point.
