he could write to his master, Lloyd. Auld had been right when he said it would be Douglass unfit to be a slave, because he now found that he was feeling anguish of having a free mind trapped in a slave’s body. Later he said of this, "I almost envy my fellow slaves in their stupid indifference…I wished myself a beast, a bird, anything rather than a slave."# Although he was in bondage now however, he was intent on winning his freedom. Douglass had the desire, the arguments to justify his freedom, and movements to give him hope. He never stopped believing that the universe we live in is a moral one. He compared the struggle between slavery and freedom to similar conflicts that occur in nature. "Like the great forces of the physical world, fire, steam and lightning, they had slumbered in the bosom of nature since the world began."# During the 1850s Douglass moved beyond Garrison’s philosophy of nonresistance and said it was a slave’s moral right to overthrown their oppressors. Douglass accomplished many feats worth noting. In the 1860s he was the "stationmaster and conductor" of the Underground Railroad in Rochester. He helped raise two regiments of black soldiers during the Civil War, the 54th and 55th Massachusetts. After the war he fought for enactment of the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments to the Constitution. He became U. S. marshal for the District of Columbia in 1877 and recorder of deeds in Washington D. C. in 1881. He was also the U. S. minister to Haiti from 1889 to 1891. Frederick Douglass stood at the center of the crisis black intellectuals faced at the end of the Civil War and thereafter. He was the most influential of all the black leaders throughout the mid 19th century. ...
