Washington was an excellent host of a certain sort. He was congenial without being deeply personal, friendly without being familiar, and perfected a cool sociability that distanced him from people even as it invited them closer. He never felt the urge to impress people. As John Marshall wrote, “He had no pretensions to that vivacity which fascinates, and to that wit which dazzles.” He knew the value of silence, largely kept opinions to himself, and seldom committed a faux pas.
Very concerned with winning the approval of others, Washington tended his image with extreme care, suggesting a self-conscious insecurity about how people perceived him. Peter Henriques has commented on Washington’s “intense fear of failure” and the hundreds of times the word approbation crops up in his letters. Since he struck people as stern and grave, pleasant and affable at once, he seemed to embody Benjamin Franklin’s maxim “Let all men know thee, but no man know thee thoroughly.” People sensed the turbulent, buried emotions within him and occasionally glimpsed their raw power. One stage actor who visited Mount Vernon said that Washington had “a compression of the mouth and [an] indentation of the brow . . . suggesting habitual conflict with and mastery over passion.”
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