The Barbary Wars are sometimes called "America's Forgotten War", although they share that dubious honor with several other conflicts. The wars largely passed out of popular memory within a generation. After September 11, 2001, some interest in the wars has been revived, with comparisons between the Americans' no-compromise stance in the early 1800s to the current War on Terrorism.
The punitive actions against the Barbary States were launched by the administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. When they proved successful, partisans of the Jeffersonian Republicans contrasted their administrations' refusal to buy off the pirates with the failure of the preceding federalist administration to live up to the rhetorical flight: