As we know, Jefferson had explicitly disavowed such an expansive meaning, and Lincoln had also distinguished between a Jeffersonian rationale for ending slavery, which he embraced, and one for justifying racial equality, which, like Jefferson, he rejected. Myrdal now claimed that the latent meaning of the Jeffersonian promise had always been broad and inclusive, and that by the middle of the twentieth century the truths that Jefferson had declared self-evident in the eighteenth century, and that Lincoln had reaffirmed in the nineteenth, were blooming again with a new biracial flowering.
