托马斯·杰斐逊“是最令我们着迷的开国总统，”乔恩·米查姆这样写道。不仅仅是我们，他同代的人也为他着迷，其中当然包括女士。在米查姆精湛且详尽的新传记《托马斯·杰斐逊：权力的艺术》（Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power）一书中，那段描述杰斐逊造访报纸出版商、共和党同仁塞缪尔·哈里森·史密斯华盛顿官邸的文字是我最喜欢的故事之一。史密斯的太太玛格丽特（她个人的政治倾向偏向于联邦党人）在客厅中与这位来访的绅士独处了几分钟，但她起初并不知道杰斐逊的身份。

    起初，杰斐逊“凝重而矜持的神态”让她“颇有些不自在，”史密斯太太后来写道。但这种感觉很快就消失了。“他的举止、表情和声音中似乎蕴含着某种东西，一下子就打开了我的心扉，”她回忆道，同时还特别提及“他聆听我说话时所表现出来的那种兴致”。后来，史密斯太太发现这位高大英俊的陌生人不是别人，正是“杰斐逊先生”，她顿时觉得“脸颊绯红，心怦怦直跳……难道这就是我经常听闻联邦党人厉声谴责的那位凶暴的民主党人、粗俗的煽动家、大胆的无神论者，那位行为不检点的浪子？眼前这位的举止是那么地温顺，声音是那么地轻柔，面容是那么地宽厚而睿智，他怎么可能是一位无畏的派系领袖、和平的扰乱者、一切等级和秩序的公敌呢？”

    米查姆曾凭借其上一部总统传记《美国雄狮：白宫中的安德鲁·杰克逊》（American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House）荣膺普利策奖（Pulitzer Prize）。米查姆对杰斐逊的主要兴趣集中在他如何行使手中的权力，或许还包括今天的领袖（笔者想补充的是，这里所说的领袖不仅包括政界，还包括商界）能够从他的身上学到哪些教益。当然，我们现在生活在党派立场对峙的时代，但我们很难想象在杰斐逊时代的美国，政治分歧有多么严重，有多少政治问题悬而未决。我们不再争辩民选总统相对于世袭君主制的优点。我们无须担心爆发军事政变或者外国入侵的可能性。我们都认为，奴隶制是邪恶的；即使有几个红色州递交了分离请愿书，但我们依然有理由相信这个联邦将永存下去。或者，我们至少不再担心拥护联邦制，藐视“邪恶的民主体制”的马萨诸塞州有可能自行其是，而且还将带走新英格兰地区的其他几个州——而杰斐逊一直到1804年还非常担心这件事。

    Thomas Jefferson, Jon Meacham writes, "is the founding president who charms us most." Not just us. He charmed his contemporaries, too, and not only but definitely also the ladies. One of my favorite stories in Meacham's masterful and intimate new biography, Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power, is about a visit Jefferson made to the Washington home of newspaper publisher and fellow Republican Samuel Harrison Smith. Smith's wife, Margaret, whose own leanings were toward the Federalists, spent a few minutes alone in the parlor with the gentleman caller, not yet knowing who he was.

    At first, she was "somewhat checked" by his "dignified and reserved air," Mrs. Smith later wrote, but the feeling quickly passed. "There was something in his manner, his countenance and voice that at once unlocked my heart," she recalled, noting especially "the interest with which he listened" to her. When she discovered that the tall, handsome stranger was none other than "Mr. Jefferson," Mrs. Smith "felt my cheeks burn and my heart throb … And is this the violent democrat, the vulgar demagogue, the bold atheist and profligate man I have so often heard denounced by the Federalists? Can this man so meek and mild, so soft and low, with a countenance so benignant and intelligent, can he be that daring leader of a faction, that disturber of the peace, that enemy of all rank and order?"

    Meacham, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his last big presidential biography, American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House, is mainly interested in how Jefferson wielded power, and perhaps what today's leaders -- in business as much as government, I'd add -- might learn from his example. We live in partisan times, to be sure, but we can hardly conceive of how deep the political divisions were in Jefferson's America, and how much was yet unsettled. We no longer debate the relative merits of an elected presidency versus a hereditary monarchy. We don't fret about the possibility of a military coup, or an invasion by a foreign power. We all agree that slavery is evil; and certain red-state secession petitions aside, we can be reasonably sure that the union will survive. (Or at least we're no longer worried, as Jefferson was right to be as late as 1804, that Federalist Massachusetts, despising the "evils of democracy," could go its own way and take the rest of New England with it.)

    杰斐逊任性固执，野心勃勃，要求严格。他容不得下属（无论是人还是兽）的冒犯。一位孙辈回忆称：“印象中祖父的急躁脾气只发在他的马身上，哪怕马儿表现出一丁点不听话的苗头，他就会无畏地挥起鞭子，抽打个不停，直至马儿屈服于他的意志为止。”但隐藏在种种政治博弈之后的，是一种极其精明的“政治本能，”米查姆写道。“他只打那些他认为他现在就能够赢得胜利的政治斗争。”

    对于这位“人人生而平等”这一名句的作者来说，奴隶制构成了他的终极政治困境。尽管如此，自身就是一位奴隶主的杰斐逊依然曾经多次尝试着推动他的国民不断前行；他主张解放奴隶，辅之以驱逐出境。在杰斐逊起草的《独立宣言》的最初版本中，他谴责奴隶贸易。他深知，历史在他那一边（“命运之书上毫无疑义地写着：这些人应该获得自由……”）。但他逐渐明白，现在还不是解放奴隶的时候，这不仅仅是因为佐治亚州和北卡罗莱纳州激烈反对。“我相信，在这些谴责之下，我们北方的兄弟也觉得这个问题有些棘手。这是因为，尽管他们自身并没有多少奴隶，但他们曾经将大批奴隶卖给其他人，”杰斐逊写道。迫于现实，尽管他非常憎恶自己的话被他人（特别是各种团体）改写，但杰斐逊还是允许删除掉这段冒犯性的言论。

    米查姆写道：“他喜欢安静，但无法忍受寂静。”读到这段话之前，笔者一直以为这是一种现代社会才具有，由iPod予以满足的神经官能症。他不拉小提琴（在他的太太帕蒂因分娩过早地离世之前，她经常陪伴他弹钢琴）或独自哼着歌曲的时候，杰斐逊就置身于一群歌唱的小鸟之中。他给自己最喜欢的一只鸟取名迪克，这只鸟一直陪他住在白宫。据上文提到的史密斯太太讲述，迪克“陪伴他度过了许多孤寂和勤勉工作的时光。”迪克常常陪着总统上楼午休，栖息在沙发上，“演奏悦耳的曲调。”

    阅读这些文字时，我们几乎可以把杰斐逊想象成为一位正在《每日秀》（The Daily Show）上接受乔恩·斯图尔特采访的嘉宾，毕恭毕敬，侃侃而谈“人的权利”。杰斐逊是一位新闻迷（“他必须知道一切事情”）；一位艺人（“不断且慷慨地，带有一定目的地娱乐他人，”他认为“善于社交是推行共和主义的必要前提”）；一位爱树者（“在我看来，不必要地砍伐一颗或许已经生长了几个世纪的树，或许与谋杀没有太大的区别”），以及一位无神论者，仅凭这一项原因，他或许无法赢得今日的大选。美国的这位开国之父写道：“总有一天，所谓耶稣以上帝为父，在处女的子宫中神秘诞生的说法，将与罗马女神米涅瓦从罗马主神朱比特的脑中诞生的说法一样，被视为寓言。”没错，这一天迟早会来临。

    译者：任文科

    Jefferson was willful, ambitious, and demanding. He did not take kindly to being crossed by his inferiors, be they man or beast. ("The only impatience of temper he ever displayed," a grandson recalled, "was with his horse, which he subdued to his will by a fearless application of the whip on the slightest manifestation of restiveness.") But underlying all his political maneuverings was an uncanny "political instinct," Meacham writes, "to fight only those political battles he believed he could win now."

    For the author of the phrase, "all men are created equal," slavery posed the ultimate political dilemma. A slave owner himself, Jefferson nevertheless tried several times to nudge his countrymen forward; he favored emancipation coupled with deportation. In his original draft of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson denounced the slave trade. He knew that history was on his side. ("Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate, than that these people are to be free ...") But he came to understand that now was not the time for emancipation, and not just because Georgia and North Carolina were violently opposed. "Our Northern brethren," Jefferson wrote, "also I believe felt a little tender under those censures; for though their people have very few slaves themselves yet they had been pretty considerable carriers of them to others." Bowing to reality, and as much as he hated to be edited, especially by groups, Jefferson allowed the offending passage to be struck.

    "He liked quiet but he could not stand silence," Meacham writes, which, until I read that, I assumed was a strictly modern, iPod-enabled neurosis. When he wasn't playing the violin (often accompanied, before her early death in childbirth, by his wife Patty on the piano), or humming to himself, Jefferson surrounded himself with singing birds. His favorite was one he named Dick, who lived with him in the White House, and according to the same Mrs. Smith, "was the constant companion of his solitary and studious hours." Dick used to follow the president upstairs at naptime and "pour forth its melodious strains" from its perch on the couch.

    The Jefferson that emerges from these pages is a figure we can almost imagine Jon Stewart interviewing, respectfully and with reference to "the rights of man," on The Daily Show. Jefferson was a news junkie ("He had to know everything"); an entertainer ("constantly, handsomely and with a purpose," believing "sociability was essential to republicanism"); a tree-hugger ("The unnecessary felling of a tree, perhaps the growth of centuries, seems to me a crime little short of murder"); and an atheist, who for that reason alone could never win an election today. "And the day will come," this founding father wrote, "when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter." Yes, well, all in good time.