It's the 'Holy Grail' of Baptist Anti-Slavery Documents

Jennifer Cromack was combing through the American Baptist archive when she uncovered a slim box among some 18th- and 19th-century journals. Opening it, she found a scroll in pristine condition. A closer look revealed the 5-foot-long document was a handwritten declaration titled "A Resolution and Protest Against Slavery," signed by 116 New England ministers and adopted March 2, 1847. Until its discovery in May at the archives in Groton, Massachusetts, American Baptist officials worried the anti-slavery document had been lost forever, the AP reports. A copy was last seen in a 1902 history book. "I was just amazed and excited," says Cromack, a retired teacher who volunteers at the archive.

The document offers a glimpse into an emerging debate over slavery in the Northeast. The document was signed 14 years before the start of the Civil War as a growing number of religious leaders were starting to speak out against slavery.

• The document also shines a spotlight on a critical moment in the history of the Baptist church. It was signed two years after the issue of slavery prompted southern Baptists to split from northern Baptists and form the Southern Baptist Convention. The split in 1845 followed a ruling by the American Baptist Foreign Mission Society prohibiting slave owners from becoming missionaries. The northern Baptists eventually became American Baptist Churches USA.
• "It was a unique moment in history when Baptists in Massachusetts stepped up and ... stood for justice in the shaping of this country," says Rev. Mary Day Hamel, executive minister of the American Baptist Churches of Massachusetts. "That's become part of our heritage to this day, to be people who stand for justice ... to embrace diversity."

• The document explains why the ministers "disapprove and abhor the system of American slavery." "With such a system we can have no sympathy," the document states. "After a careful observation of its character and effects ... 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."
• Since its discovery, Rev. Diane Badger, the administrator of the American Baptist Church of Massachusetts who oversees the archive, has put all the ministers' names on a spreadsheet along with the churches where they served. "It's been kind of an interesting journey," Badger says. "The questions that always come to me, OK, I know who signed it but who didn't?"