| ||
|---|---|---|
Personal 16th President of the United States
Tenure Speeches and works   | ||
| U.S. congressional opposition to American involvement in wars and interventions |
|---|
 |
| 1812North America |
| House Federalists’ Address |
| 1847Mexican–American War |
| Spot Resolutions |
| 1917World War I |
| Filibuster of the Armed Ship Bill |
| 1935–1939 |
| Neutrality Acts |
| 1935–1940 |
| Ludlow Amendment |
| 1970Vietnam |
| McGovern–Hatfield Amendment |
| 1970Southeast Asia |
| Cooper–Church Amendment |
| 1971 Vietnam |
| Repeal of Tonkin Gulf Resolution |
| 1973 Southeast Asia |
| Case–Church Amendment |
| 1973 |
| War Powers Resolution |
| 1974 |
| Hughes–Ryan Amendment |
| 1976Angola |
| Clark Amendment |
| 1982Nicaragua |
| Boland Amendment |
| 2007Iraq |
| House Concurrent Resolution 63 |
| 2011 Libyan War |
| House Joint Resolution 68 |
| 2013 Syrian Civil War |
| Syria Resolution |
| 2018–2019Yemen |
| Yemen War Powers Resolution |
Thespot resolutions were offered in theUnited States House of Representatives on 22 December 1847 by future PresidentAbraham Lincoln, then aWhig representative fromIllinois. The resolutions requested PresidentJames K. Polk to provide Congress with the exact location (the "spot") upon which blood was spilled on American soil, as Polk had claimed in 1846 when asking Congress to declarewar on Mexico. Lincoln's persistence in pushing his "spot resolutions" led some to begin referring to him as "spotty Lincoln." Lincoln's resolutions were a direct challenge to the validity of the president's words, and representative of an ongoing political power struggle between Whigs andDemocrats.[1]
Eight resolutions sought specific information. The first: "whether the spot on which the blood of our citizens was shed, as in his messages declared, was or was not within the territory of Spain, at least after the treaty of 1819, until the Mexican revolution." The second: "whether that spot is or is not within the territory which was wrested from Spain by the revolutionary Government of Mexico." The other six resolutions extended the analysis to determine whether the territory on which the casualties occurred was ever under the government or laws of Texas or of the United States. The House of Representatives never acted on Lincoln's resolutions, but they demonstrated the Whig reluctance to accept President Polk's grounds to begin the war.[2][3]
According to Lincoln biographerDavid Herbert Donald, "nobody paid much attention to his resolutions, which the House neither debated nor adopted".[4] Many Democrats regarded the resolutions as unpatriotic; some Whigs cautioned that criticism of the war would hurt the Whigs politically. Lincoln, however, was not speaking out against the war itself, but rather against Polk's conduct of it. In fact, the Whigs would later nominateZachary Taylor (a hero of the war) as their candidate, whom Lincoln supported.
The location where the initial bloodshed (known as theThornton Affair) occurred in April 1846 is located in present-dayCameron County, Texas, just north of theRio Grande which represented the American claim for Texas's boundary with Mexico (as well as the current international border). The Mexican claim set the boundary at theNueces River, considerably further north.
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