It is the easiest thing in the world, as all editors know, to pervert the meaning and give a one-sided impression of a whole speech by simply giving isolated passages from the speech itself, without any qualifying connections.
In his autobiography, Douglass critiques the media's power to distort meaning by selectively quoting from speeches, highlighting the importance of context.
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More from Frederick Douglass
Lincoln was not only a great President, but a GREAT MAN--too great to be small in anything.
The father might be a white man, glorying in the purity of his Anglo-Saxon blood, and his child ranked with the blackest slaves.
For the moment the northern lamb was transformed into a lion, and his roar was terrible.