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Most people do not know that Abraham Lincoln is a hero for his acts as a freshman member of the House of Representatives in the Congress of 1847-1849. Lincoln demanded that the President of the US provide specific evidence justifying the US invading a foreign country, stating the obvious on the floor of Congress that the President’s claims of a defensive war were lies to propagandize an offensive war for territorial control against a weaker nation.

He did so despite the lack of support from most of his own political party. He demanded the facts despite his being painted by political opponents and the press as “unpatriotic.” The propaganda defeated Lincoln at his next election; his name slurred as “spotty Lincoln.”

We now know that Lincoln was correct that the US President had indeed lied about the cause of war.

We find ourselves in a similar situation. In our current US wars of invasion, our own government investigations have revealed the exact evidence backing claims that these are defensive wars for our national security. We now know from the evidence that all of these claims were not only false, but known to be false at the time they were told to the American people and Congress.

We also have lying rhetoric for an offensive war in Iran, propagandized as “pre-emptive” defense, despite its illegality in the clear letter and intent of the law, and easily understood through analogy of the laws governing an individual’s use of self-defense on the street.

Let’s review the courageous words of truth from Mr. Lincoln, and encourage ourselves to act against these treasonous and cowardly wars that have so-far killed over 4,000 American troops. The following five paragraphs from Mr. Lincoln’s speech in Congress deserve your full attention, are written in his acclaimed concise and powerful prose, and echoes the advice of our Founding Fathers. If you'd like to consider Mr. Lincoln's advice to protect the US Constitution against American tyrants within our own government, click here.

“I carefully examined the President’s messages, to ascertain what he himself had said and proved upon the point. The result of this examination was to make the impression, that taking for true, all the President states as facts, he falls far short of proving his justification; and that the President would have gone farther with his proof, if it had not been for the small matter, that the truth would not permit him… Now I propose to try to show, that the whole of this, — issue and evidence — is, from beginning to end, the sheerest deception.

… This strange omission, it does seem to me, could not have occurred but by design. My way of living leads me to be about the courts of justice; and there, I have sometimes seen a good lawyer, struggling for his client’s neck, in a desperate case, employing every artifice to work round, befog, and cover up, with many words, some point arising in the case, which he dared not admit, and yet could not deny…. Let him answer, fully, fairly, and candidly. Let him answer with facts, and not with arguments. Let him remember he sits where Washington sat, and so remembering, let him answer, as Washington would answer. As a nation should not, and the Almighty will not, be evaded, so let him attempt no envasion — no equivocation.

…But if he can not, or will not do this — if on any pretence, or no pretence, he shall refuse or omit it, then I shall be fully convinced, of what I more than suspect already, that he is deeply conscious of being in the wrong that he feels the blood of this war, like the blood of Abel, is crying to Heaven against him. That originally having some strong motive — what, I will not stop now to give my opinion concerning — to involve the two countries in a war, and trusting to escape scrutiny, by fixing the public gaze upon the exceeding brightness of military glory — that attractive rainbow, that rises in showers of blood — that serpent’s eye, that charms to destroy he plunged into it, and has swept, on and on, till, disappointed in his calculation of the ease with which Mexico might be subdued, he now finds himself, he knows not where. How like the half insane mumbling of a fever-dream, is the whole war part of his late message!

... So then, the national honor, security of the future, and every thing but territorial indemnity, may be considered the no-purposes, and indefinite, objects of the war!... If the prossecution of the war has, in expenses, already equalled the better half of the country, how long its future prosecution, will be in equalling, the less valuable half, is not a speculative, but a practical question, pressing closely upon us. And yet it is a question which the President seems to never have thought of. As to the mode of terminating the war, and securing peace, the President is equally wandering and indefinite. First, it is to be done by a more vigorous prossecution of the war in the vital parts of the enemies country; and, after apparently, talking himself tired, on this point, the President drops down into a half despairing tone, and tells us that "with a people distracted and divided by contending factions, and a government subject to constant changes, by successive revolutions, the continued success of our arms may fail to secure a satisfactory peace[.]" Then he suggests the propriety of wheedling the Mexican people to desert the counsels of their own leaders, and trusting in our protection, to set up a government from which we can secure a satisfactory peace; telling us, that "this may become the only mode of obtaining such a peace." But soon he falls into doubt of this too; and then drops back on to the already half abandoned ground of "more vigorous prossecution.["] All this shows that the President is, in no wise, satisfied with his own positions. First he takes up one, and in attempting to argue us into it, he argues himself out of it; then seizes another, and goes through the same process; and then, confused at being able to think of nothing new, he snatches up the old one again, which he has some time before cast off. His mind, tasked beyond its power, is running hither and thither, like some tortured creature, on a burning surface, finding no position, on which it can settle down, and be at ease.

Again, it is a singular omission in this message, that it, no where intimates when the President expects the war to terminate. …As I have before said, he knows not where he is. He is a bewildered, confounded, and miserably perplexed man. God grant he may be able to show, there is not something about his conscious, more painful than all his mental perplexity!”

Lincoln evolved in his consideration of the US war of invasion, calling it the most oppressive of all kingly [unconstitutional] oppressions. A letter to his law partner:

“Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion, and you allow him to do so whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such purpose, and you allow him to make war at pleasure. Study to see if you can fix any limit to his power in this respect, after having given him so much as you propose. If to-day he should choose to say he thinks it necessary to invade Canada to prevent the British from invading us, how could you stop him? You may say to him, — "I see no probability of the British invading us"; but he will say to you, "Be silent: I see it, if you don't."

To provision of the Constitution giving the war making power to Congress was dictated, as I understand it, by the following reasons: Kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object. This our convention understood to be the most oppressive of all kingly oppressions, and they resolved to so frame the Constitution that no one man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us. But your view destroys the whole matter, and places our President where kings have always stood.”

And finally, in another speech on the House floor less than four months before he would lose re-election from the consequences of telling the truth about the US War of Aggression:

“If to say ‘the war was unnecessarily and unconstitutionally commenced by the President’ by opposing the war, then the Whigs have very generally opposed it. Whenever they have spoken at all, they have said this; and they have said it on what has appeared good reason to them. The marching an army into the midst of a peaceful Mexican settlement, frightening the inhabitants away, leaving their growing crops and other property to destruction, to you may appear a perfectly amiable, peaceful, unprovoking procedure; but it does not appear so to us. So to call such an act, to us appears no other than a naked, impudent absurdity, and we speak of it accordingly.”

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