A long handwritten anti-slavery declaration from Boston in 1847 was rediscovered in 2025 inside an archival box at the American Baptist archive at Grotonwood Camp in Massachusetts.

Signed on March 2, 1847, by 116 New England ministers, the nearly 180-year-old handwritten document—identified as “A Resolution and Protest Against Slavery”—offers a real-time look at the opinions on the practice of slavery circulating through the United States during the era just predating the Civil War. And its discovery was purely by accident, according to the American Baptist Churches of Massachusetts.

Retired teacher Jennifer Cromack, volunteering at the camp and conference center’s archives, was helping put new shelving units together and reorganizing boxes of records when she opened a bankers’ box and found a long, narrow archival box among a mix of 18^th- and 19^th-century journals. Those in the room knew the scroll’s importance immediately.

“I was just amazed and excited,” Cromack told the Associated Press. “We made a find that really says something to the people of the state and the people in the country. […] It speaks of their commitment to keeping people safe and out of situations that they should not be in.”

Diane Badger, administrator of the American Baptist Churches of Massachusetts and archive overseer, called the find the “Holy Grail” of abolitionist-era Baptist documents, according to the AP. Since then, the Massachusetts Baptist Archives said the 1847 declaration has been restored, and TABCOM’s 2025 annual report said donors raised money to help preserve the original scroll. The archive is also fundraising for a display case that would make the document a permanent part of the collection.

In the mid-19^th century, when the declaration was written and signed, the slavery debate was far from settled. Just two years prior, the Baptist church was split on the matter, with a southern group splintering from the northern sect over the issue. “[The northern chruch] thought it was a southern problem, and they had no business getting involved in what they saw as the state’s rights,” Deborah Bingham Van Broekhoven, executive director emerita of the American Baptist Historical Society, told the AP. “Most Baptists, prior to this, would have refrained from this kind of protest. This is a very good example of them going out on a limb and trying to be diplomatic.”

“It comes from such a critical era in American history, you know, right prior to the Civil War,” said Mary Day Hamel, executive minister of the American Baptist Churches of Massachusetts, according to AP. “It was a unique moment in history when Baptists in Massachusetts stepped up and took a strong position and stood for justice in the shaping of this country.”

The declaration was described in the appendix of Historical Sketch of the Massachusetts Baptist Missionary Society and Convention, 1802–1902, a history volume dated to 1903. At that time, the original document was said to be in the possession of the Massachusetts Baptist Convention. Its exact whereabouts later became unclear, despite inquiries to the Massachusetts Historical Society, Harvard University, and Brown University.

CBS Boston later added a practical clue to the mystery: the church’s archival materials had moved from Boston to Newton to Groton, and the roomful of papers was shifted along the way. The scroll did not reappear because someone solved a grand archival puzzle. It reappeared because Cromack opened the right box.

The ministers wrote that they had hoped reform would come from those most directly involved in slavery, making a written protest unnecessary. Instead, they said they had watched “with painful surprise” as people grew more willing to “justify, extend, and perpetuate” the system. Silence, they concluded, was no longer an option.

“Under these circumstances we can no longer be silent,” they wrote. “We owe something to the oppressed as well as to the oppressor, and justice demands the fulfillment of that obligation. Truth and humanity and public virtue have claims upon us which we cannot dishonor.”

After the rediscovery, Badger began working to identify the 116 ministers and the churches they served, connecting the names to later anti-slavery work. She also became interested in the ministers who did not sign. “I can go through my list, through my database, and find who was working where on that and why didn’t they sign that,” Badger said. “So, it’s been very interesting to do the research.”

Still, the focus is on the majority of ministers who took a stand in 1847. “With such a system we can have no sympathy,” the ministers wrote. “After a careful observation of its character and effects and making every deduction with the largest charity can require, we are constrained to regard it as an outrage upon the rights and happiness of our fellow men, for which there is no valid justification or apology.”