 It is a matter of debate among scholars whether the notion of early Hispanic American liberalism is only a retrospective reconstruction or whether it is apt to refer to the initial usage of some liberal ideas for political and legal purposes as a sort of “liberalism”. As mentioned, at this early state in the first half of the nineteenth century there were no political groups that self-identified as “liberal”. The political usage of the term was not yet well established in the region. The term “liberal” still carried with it its original moral meaning associated with noble qualities of generosity and magnanimity, which, in the Hispanic-Portuguese Catholic tradition, were virtues that the monarch had to have (Fernández Sebastián 2009: 703–4). In this moral sense, “liberal” was opposed to tyranny and despotism. From the perspective afforded by this widespread moral usage of the term, it became difficult for Hispanic Americans political actors to identify themselves as “liberals” along the lines of Spanish liberalism. Although this may seem paradoxical, the reason is that the liberal Spanish Courts came to be seen as “illiberal” since they had grudgingly granted representation rights to as few American deputies as possible in the Cádiz constitution. Early Spanish liberalism proved not to be incompatible with empire. This led some Hispanic American liberals to claim distance from Spanish liberalism despite the fact that the greatest impulse for the spread of liberal ideas in Latin America was the Cadiz constitution. According to their own self-perception, for instance, Colombian liberals owed nothing to the latter. It was only in the twentieth century that historians have demonstrated the inaccuracy of this self-conception (Martínez Garnica 2006).