1865: a graceful exit: in one momentous decision, Robert E. Lee spared the United States years of divisive violence Jay Winik American Heritage. 59.4 (Winter 2010): p60. Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2010 American Heritage Publishing http://www.americanheritage.com/ Full Text:  AS APRIL 1865 NEARED, an exhausted Abraham Lincoln met with his two top generals, Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman, to discuss the end of the Civil War, which finally seemed to be within reach. Nevertheless, the president--"having seen enough of the horrors of war" remained d conflicted. To be sure, the endless sound of muddy boots tramping across City Point, Virginia, and the heavy ruts left by cannon wheels marked Grant's preparations for a final all-out push to ensnare the Army of Northern Virginia. Yet Lincoln could not shake off his deep-seated fears that Robert E. Lee would Somehow escape Grant's clutches or, worse still, that his worn but still formidable forces would melt into the western mountains to continue the war indefinitely as marauding guerrilla bands. Nor was this idle speculation. Lee himself had once boasted that if he could get his army into the Blue Ridge Mountains, he could continue the war for another "20 years." [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Grant himself shared Lincoln's foreboding, later confessing, "I was afraid every morning that I would awake from my sleep to hear that Lee had gone ... and the war was prolonged." At one point during their final meeting at City Point, a morose Lincoln pleaded, "My God! Can't you spare more effusions of blood? We have had so much of it." Indeed, what most haunted him now was the belief that the war might end only after some final mass slaughter, or that it would dwindle into a long twilight of barbarism or mindless retaliation, as had happened in so many other civil wars, thus unleashing an endless cycle of more bloodshed and national division. To reunite the country, Lincoln believed the conflict's close must be marked by something profoundly different: a spirit of reconciliation. But after four years of bloodletting, could it? Distressingly, on the fateful morning of April 9, 1865, the decision ironically seemed to be more in Lee's hands than in Lincoln's. When the first glimmer of sun broke around 5 a.m., Lee's vaunted army was at last surrounded, and the aging general now faced a decision that would forever shape the nation's history. With gunfire still rattling in the distance, Lee convened a council of war. The talk turned to surrender, whereupon one of Lee's top aides protested that "a little more blood more or less now makes no difference." Instead he suggested that the Confederates play the trump card that Lincoln most dreaded and dissolve into the hills as guerrillas. As Lee carefully listened, he knew that this option was not lightly to be ignored. Just days earlier, the fleeing Confederate president, Jefferson Davis, had issued his own call for guerrilla struggle. And hundreds of Lee's men had alread ...

1. 1865: a graceful exit: in one momentous decision, Robert E. Lee
spared the United States years of divisive violence
Jay Winik
American Heritage. 59.4 (Winter 2010): p60.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2010 American Heritage Publishing
http://www.americanheritage.com/
Full Text:
AS APRIL 1865 NEARED, an exhausted Abraham Lincoln met
with his two top generals, Ulysses S. Grant and William
Tecumseh Sherman, to discuss the end of the Civil War, which
finally seemed to be within reach. Nevertheless, the president--
"having seen enough of the horrors of war" remained d
conflicted. To be sure, the endless sound of muddy boots
tramping across City Point, Virginia, and the heavy ruts left by
cannon wheels marked Grant's preparations for a final all-out
push to ensnare the Army of Northern Virginia. Yet Lincoln
could not shake off his deep-seated fears that Robert E. Lee
would Somehow escape Grant's clutches or, worse still, that his
worn but still formidable forces would melt into the western
mountains to continue the war indefinitely as marauding
guerrilla bands. Nor was this idle speculation. Lee himself had
once boasted that if he could get his army into the Blue Ridge
Mountains, he could continue the war for another "20 years."
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Grant himself shared Lincoln's foreboding, later confessing, "I
was afraid every morning that I would awake from my sleep to
hear that Lee had gone ... and the war was prolonged." At one
point during their final meeting at City Point, a morose Lincoln
pleaded, "My God! Can't you spare more effusions of blood?
We have had so much of it." Indeed, what most haunted him
now was the belief that the war might end only after some final
mass slaughter, or that it would dwindle into a long twilight of
barbarism or mindless retaliation, as had happened in so many
other civil wars, thus unleashing an endless cycle of more

2. bloodshed and national division. To reunite the country, Lincoln
believed the conflict's close must be marked by something
profoundly different: a spirit of reconciliation.
But after four years of bloodletting, could it? Distressingly, on
the fateful morning of April 9, 1865, the decision ironically
seemed to be more in Lee's hands than in Lincoln's. When the
first glimmer of sun broke around 5 a.m., Lee's vaunted army
was at last surrounded, and the aging general now faced a
decision that would forever shape the nation's history.
With gunfire still rattling in the distance, Lee convened a
council of war. The talk turned to surrender, whereupon one of
Lee's top aides protested that "a little more blood more or less
now makes no difference." Instead he suggested that the
Confederates play the trump card that Lincoln most dreaded and
dissolve into the hills as guerrillas. As Lee carefully listened,
he knew that this option was not lightly to be ignored. Just days
earlier, the fleeing Confederate president, Jefferson Davis, had
issued his own call for guerrilla struggle. And hundreds of Lee's
men had already vanished into the countryside on their own
initiative, anticipating precisely that.
Could Lee have done it? Here, surely, was temptation. No less
than for Davis, the momentous step of surrender was anathema
to him. Moreover, the South's long mountain ranges, endless
swamps, and dark forests were well suited for a protracted
partisan conflict. Its fighters, such as the cunning John Mosby
and the hard-bitten cavalryman Nathan Bedford Forrest, not to
mention young Confederates such as Jesse James, had already
made life a festering hell for the Union forces with lightning
hit-and-run raids. If Lee had resorted to guerrilla war, he
arguably could have launched one of the most effective partisan
movements in all history.
In fact, in Missouri a full-scale guerrilla war characterized by
ruthless reprisals and random terror was already under way with
such ferocity that the entire state had been dragged into a
whirlpool of vengeance. As jurist and political philosopher
Francis Lieber ominously told Lincoln, "Where these guerrillas

3. flourish, [they create] a slaughter field."
In hindsight, we can see that in a countrywide guerrilla war, the
nation would quickly have become mired in a nightmarish
conflict without fronts, without boundaries between combatant
and civilian, and without end. It could well have brought about
the Vietnamization of America or, even more distressingly, its
Iraqization, disfiguring this country for decades, if not for all
time.
But after careful deliberation, Lee rejected the option of
protracted anarchy and mayhem, insisting that "we would bring
on a state of affairs that would take the country years to recover
from." By this one momentous decision, he spared the United
States generations of divisive violence, as well as the sepsis of
malice and outrage that would have invariably delayed any true
national reconciliation.
But if this were perhaps Lee's finest day, so too it was Grant's.
At the surrender at Appomattox Courthouse, Grant, heeding
Lincoln's injunction for a tender peace now that the war was
close at hand, treated Lee's defeated army with extraordinary
generosity, not as hated foes but as brothers to be embraced.
The most poignant moment of this most poignant of days came
after the instruments of surrender were signed, and an emotion-
choked Lee mounted his horse Traveler and let out a long, deep
sigh. In a brilliant masterstroke, Grant walked out onto the
porch of the Wilmer McLean house and, in front of all his
officers and men, silently raised his hat to the man who just that
morning had been his ardent adversary, saluting him as an
honored comrade--a gesture quickly echoed by innumerable
other Union officers.
This one small act would loom large in the months to come,
rippling out into every corner of the South and setting a tone for
the healing that was so critical if the country were "to bind up"
its wounds, as Lincoln so eloquently put it. And lest anyone
mistake the importance of reconciliation for both sides, Lee
would later remark: "I surrendered as much to Lincoln's
goodness as I did to Grant's armies."

4. Jay Winik, the author of April 1865 (HarperCollins 2001) and
The Great Upheaval (Harper 2007), serves on the governing
board of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Winik, Jay
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Winik, Jay. "1865: a graceful exit: in one momentous decision,
Robert E. Lee spared the United States years of divisive
violence." American Heritage, Winter 2010, p. 60+. General
OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=oran95108&v=2.1
&id=GALE%7CA214201750&it=r&asid=261cb5212fd674e9753
1e9c3a9c7a95c. Accessed 18 Dec. 2016.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A214201750
EDU 381: Curriculum and Instructional Design
Week Two Assignment – EXAMPLE 1
Grade Level
I chose the 1st grade, because this is the age when children are
really starting to read on
their own. They are choosing the type of books that they believe
that they would like to
read and are developing a love for reading as they do so.
Instructional Model
I will use a cooperative learning model for students to read Are
You My Mother? By: P.D.

5. Eastman (Common Core Standards, n.d., page 14) aloud as a
class. We will take turns
reading and helping each other pronounce words and point out
new vocabulary.
Standards
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.1.7
Use illustrations and details in a story to describe its characters,
setting, or events.
(Common Core State Standards Initiative, n.d.)
Objectives
Students will understand
• The Student will understand the differences between the
secondary characters in the story
and the main character (the baby bird).
Students will know
• The Student will know new vocabulary words and sounds.
• The Student will know sight words from previous lessons.
Students will be able to
• The Student will be able to identify different types of animals
and their offspring.

6. • The Student will be able to read the story aloud on their own
or to their parent.
Assessment Plan
Formative:
http://www.corestandards.org/ELA-Literacy/RL/1/7/
For a formative assessment I would have each student use their
individual white board to
answer questions. Questions would include differences between
secondary characters and
the main character; what may happen next and whether the
secondary character is the
main character’s mother. Another formative assessment I would
use would be to have
each of the students read a passage aloud and to make
“suggestions” as to the definition
of new words based on the context of the passage. The
formative assessments would take
place during the reading of the story.
Summative:
For the summative assessment, I would pass out worksheets that
have pictures of the

7. main and secondary characters and babies of the secondary
characters. The students
would be allowed to color and cut out the pictures. The students
would use string and
popsicle sticks to create a mobile. On one end of the popsicle
stick would the adult
secondary character and on the other end of the popsicle stick
would be the correct baby
for that character.
Procedure
1. Review previously learned material
I would use Bloom’s Taxonomy of “remember, understand and
apply” (Hansen, et al.,
2015, Section 3.4). I would place a few passages from the story
on the board and ask the
students to list their sight words (words that they have learned
in previous lessons and
should recognize) on their individual white boards.
2.State objectives of the lesson
I will list the new vocabulary words that the students will come
across while reading the
story. I will also list the different types of animals the main and
secondary characters are

8. (but not in the order that they will appear). We will go over the
words as a class before
reading the story.
3. Present new material
As the class comes across a new vocabulary word in the story, I
will point out the word
and ask the students to write down the meaning on their
individual white boards. They
will derive the definition from the surrounding sentence. The
animals will be identified as
Comment [nm1]: Love it! Very profitable
strategy
Comment [nm2]: Your strategies sound great,
but what will you do with the data the formative
assessments presents to you.
Comment [nm3]: On one end of the popsicle
stick... Love it!
Excellent Project-Based assessment. How will this be
graded? Will you create a rubric
the main character meets them. The students will chose the
name of the animal from the
list on the board, and will list on their individual white boards
the physical differences

9. between the main character and the secondary characters. We
will then discuss what the
secondary character’s baby would look like (the image I will
display will match the
image on the worksheet for the formative assessment).
4. Guided practice
Some of the questions I would ask during the course of the story
would include: Who is
the main character? Where does the story take place? Who are
some of the secondary
characters? What is different between the main character and
the secondary characters?
What is the same? Is this the main characters mother?
5. Independent practice
For independent practice the students would color, cut and put
together their mobiles
(summative assessment). They would also receive a copy
(whether an actual book, e-
book or copy of the book printed out) to take home and practice
reading with their adult. I
would include a list of questions that includes the new
vocabulary for the adult to ask the

10. child as they read at home.
Common Core Standards. (n.d.). Common Core Standards for
English Language Arts and
Literacy in History/Social Studies, Science, and Technical
Subjects. Retrieved
from http://www.corestandards.org/assets/Appendix_B.pdf.
Common Core State Standards Initiative. (n.d.). English
Language Arts Standards, Reading:
Literature, Grade 1. Retrieved from
http://www.corestandards.org/ELA-Literacy/RL/1/.
Hansen, C.B., Buczynski, S., & Puckett, K.S. (2015).
Curriculum and Instruction for the 21st
Century. Bridgepoint Education.
*Turns out there is a copy of the book on YouTube. It can be
read by the student (the sound just
needs to be turned off, so that the narrator is muted), with the
parent pausing the computer on
each page. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHxxR2H-aaQ
http://www.corestandards.org/assets/Appendix_B.pdf
http://www.corestandards.org/ELA-Literacy/RL/1/
http://outboundsso.next.ecollege.com/default/launch.ed?ssoType
=CDMS&redirectUrl=https://content.ashford.edu/ssologin?book
code=AUEDU381.15.1
http://outboundsso.next.ecollege.com/default/launch.ed?ssoType
=CDMS&redirectUrl=https://content.ashford.edu/ssologin?book
code=AUEDU381.15.1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHxxR2H-aaQ