Due to an inability to garrison these colonies with an adequate military presence, the British Crown encouraged them to raise militia to defend themselves against Spanish attacks.
In addition, the British colonies raised local militia units to defend their coastal towns and ports from Spanish raids.
The time had arrived, South Carolinians believed, to remove once and for all a galling Spanish influence which had incited rebellion among slaves, to establish firm provincial boundaries and secure the Indian trade by pushing back the frontier with Spanish Florida, and to realize profits from afar which had objectives as much commercial as political.When the war had finally ended, however, South Carolinians were relieved; the war had not brought in much of the way of benefits.
The Carolinian and Georgian colonists hoped to benefit from the Spanish Alarm, but as the raids continued, merchants in the Southern Colonies realized their negative effects.
The court, "during nine years of actual warfare, recorded only twenty-one enemy ships which were captured by Charleston privateers and condemned as prizes of war".