Francisco de Miranda was a Venezuelan creole who served in the Spanish army with distinction, but his dream was the independence of his country and all of Spanish America. At the court of Catherine the Great, Miranda charmed the Russian autocrat, who was famously promiscuous. In 1792, it was his cannonade at Valmy that saved revolutionary France from invasion. In 1804, he failed at an invasion of Venezuela, but when the country went autonomous in 1810, he was called by the oligarchs to lead the patriot army. Miranda there was out of his depth. He was hardly Venezuelan, having lived most of his life elsewhere, and when he gave up before a royalist offensive in 1811, his own compatriots turned him over to the Spaniards, who locked him up in a fortress in Cádiz and practically threw away the key. Miranda died in 1816.

There was a state of war between the USA and the Barbary States which lasted from 1800 to 1815. After failed attempts to take Libyan Tripoli, the USA finally forced Algiers to agree to cease preying on its ships. In the picture Stephen Decatur, a leader of the 1804 expedition against Tripoli, is being saved by a sailor from a Libyan scimitar. Although this was a minor American war, it bequeathed the line "From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli" in the Marines' anthem, which is quite a garble: there were no Aztecs when America invaded Mexico, a war which happened decades after the Barbary Wars.

Oliver Perry, brother of Matthew Perry, became a national hero when in 1813 his ships defeated the British on lake Eire during the War of 1812. In the battle his flagship was destroyed and he transferred to another ship to carry on the fight. Perry had previously fought in the Barbary Wars.

After centuries of monarchical absolutism and Catholic conformism, Spaniards did not take easily to liberalism. The chance for liberals came during the French invasion in 1808, when, by sympathetic rebound, they adopted a liberal constitution in 1812. When Ferdinand VII was re-instated in 1814, he suppressed it. In 1820, the liberalizers, among whom military were prominent, tried again. Ferdinand equivocated and in 1823 he asked Louis XVIII to invade Spain, which he did with his "100,000 sons of St Louis" (actually the army was not as large as that). The last liberal effort at political reform was led by Jose Maria Torrijos who was captured and executed with his collaborators.