Above all, Washington never forgot what was at stake and he never gave up.

From 1776 by David McCulough. Page 293.

In the campaign in the South that set the stage for the last major battle, at Yorktown, Virginia, Nathanael Greene would prove the most brilliant American field commander of the war. Washington felt that if anything were to happen to him—were Washington to be captured or killed—Greene should become the commander-in-chief.

Of all the general officers who had taken part in the Siege of Boston, only two were still serving at the time of the British surrender at Yorktown, Washington and Greene. Henry Knox, who had become a brigadier general after the Battle of Trenton, and who fought in every battle in which Washington took part, was also present at Yorktown. Greene and Knox, the two young untried New Englanders Washington had singled out at the beginning as the best of the “raw material” he had to work with, had both shown true greatness and stayed in the fight to the finish.

Financial support from France and the Netherlands, and military support from the French army and navy, would play a large part in the outcome. But in the last analysis it was Washington and the army that won the war for American independence. The fate of the war and the revolution rested on the army. The Continental Army—not the Hudson River or the possession of New York or Philadelphia—was the key to victory. And it was Washington who held the army together and gave it “spirit” through the most desperate of times.

He was not a brilliant strategist or tactician, not a gifted orator, not an intellectual. At several crucial moments he had shown marked indecisiveness. He had made serious mistakes in judgment. But experience had been his great teacher from boyhood, and in this his greatest test, he learned steadily from experience. Above all, Washington never forgot what was at stake and he never gave up.