A volunteer searching American Baptist church archives has uncovered a nearly 180-year-old scroll that underscores the depth of religious opposition to slavery in Massachusetts. The "Declaration and Protest Against Slavery" was written in 1847 under the auspices of the Boston Baptist Association, two years a dispute over abolition of slavery caused Southern Baptists to split off and form the Southern Baptist Convention in 1845. The five-foot hand-written scroll bears the signatures of 116 Baptist ministers who declared they "disapprove and abhor the system of American slavery." The document was discovered by historian Jennifer Sten Cromack tucked inside a box in a storage room in Groton, Massachusetts, where it had been forgotten after being moved between several archives over the years. "Yeah, very surprised because I've been in and out of here, I don't know, thousands of times and I spent lots of work on those files over there and just to open a box and have it right there was amazing," Cromack said of her unexpected discovery while goingh through documents stored in boxes in the archives of the American Baptist Churches of Massachusetts. Church officials consider the scroll one of the most important abolitionist-era Baptist documents, representing organized religious resistance to slavery in the years immediately following the denomination's historic split over the issue. The 116 signatures represent a substantial portion of Baptist leadership in Massachusetts at the time, demonstrating the breadth of religious opposition to slavery in the state. Rev. Diane Badger is the administrator for the American Baptist Churches of Massachusetts. "It really was the Baptist ministers taking a stand against slavery and there were 116 pastors in Massachusetts that signed this declaration saying that they could not stand slavery – that the slavery was not something they could really adhere to, believe in, and it had to stop," Badger said. The scroll's journey through multiple archives reflects the challenges of preserving historical documents across decades. Badger said that the document was in good enough condition in 1902 to be reproduced in a church history book documenting Baptist history, but was then "rolled up and put away" and moved between various repositories before ending up forgotten in the Groton storage facility. The slavery controversy that the document addresses proved to be the defining issue that permanently divided American Baptists. "Well, this whole issue of slavery was one of the things that split the Baptist denomination. That's when the Southern Baptists started, was in the 1840s, and that was on the issue of slavery. No matter what else you read, it was the issue of the slavery that really split them,” Badger said. “And we became the Northern Baptists at that time. Then they ended up becoming the Northern Baptist and the American Baptist, with the Northern Baptists being predominantly African American. And the American Baptists were, goes across the country, and we actually do have some churches in the south." The historic scroll is priceless beyond its historical value, connecting 19th-century moral struggles to contemporary social justice issues, Badger said. "It's significant to our history, because it gives you a sense that as Baptists, we're very big into social justice. And there's a fine line between being political and having social justice, but that document speaks so much as to that time as it does in a lot of ways to today's world. As you know, we cannot lord it over another person, you know,” Badger said. “Slavery makes different forms nowadays and human trafficking and that type of thing, and it happens not only in other countries, but in some ways in this country too that we're not aware of."