"America may have lost its stomach for military intervention," Charles Blow wrote recently in the New York Times. At least among Obama supporters, that has become the most common explanation, hardening into cliché, for why the president’s call to punish Assad’s regime for gassing its own citizens met with a curdled mixture of anger and apathy. After a dozen years of fighting and paying for two long and frustrating conflicts in Islamic lands, Americans are just weary—and wary—of engaging in a third.

Behind this notion lurks the assumption that the reluctance to bomb Syria is an historic anomaly. Haven’t Americans always been willing, if not necessarily eager, to follow their presidents into the fray? For most liberals and some conservatives, that gung-ho attitude is hardly a virtue. Few of us would now agree with Theodore Roosevelt’s view that “By war alone can we acquire those virile qualities necessary to win in the stern strife of actual life.” Still, who can argue with historical truth?

Fortunately, however, the idea that Americans have traditionally been a war-loving people is false. In fact, over the past two centuries, large numbers of citizens sought to stop presidents from initiating nearly every major and minor conflict and then protested most of those interventions once they began.

A few of the more salient examples from the nineteenth century: In New England, the Federalists—then one of the two major parties—so detested James Madison’s prosecution of the War of 1812 that they planned to make a separate peace with Britain. In the mid-1840s, the war with Mexico generated a huge resistance movement, both inside and outside Congress. It included such figures as Henry David Thoreau (who went to jail instead of paying his poll tax) and a first-term Whig congressman by the name of Abraham Lincoln. During the Civil War, both the Union and the Confederacy had to grapple with internal dissenters, some of whom conveyed their objections with muskets and swords.

The armed rise of the U.S. to world power in the twentieth century was fiercely contested all along the way. The Democrats focused their 1900 campaign on opposition to the ongoing war of conquest in the Philippines. In early 1917, the public’s desire to stay out of World War I was so widespread that peace activists demanded a popular referendum on the question which they thought they had a decent chance to win. Until Charles Lindbergh started accusing Jews of seeking to pull the U.S. into World War II, his America First Committee was an ideologically diverse group with some 800,000 paid members. The throngs which railed against the wars in Indochina and forced an end to the draft belonged to the most successful of all the peace movements. If hundreds of thousands of protesters had not flocked to the Mall starting in 1965, Lyndon Johnson would likely have been elected to a second term, and Richard Nixon might never have had a first one.