The Spanish Alarm was a period from 1739-1748 in North America during which the Spanish Government sanctioned forces to raid and pillage English port towns of the provinces of North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia. Without an adequate regular military garrison in these provinces, the Kingdom of Great Britain encouraged the provinces to raise local militias to combat the Spanish-related attacks.
At the outbreak of the War of the Spanish Succession, the Province of North Carolina raised four companies of one hundred men each to join other colonial troops in the siege of Cartagena in South America. In addition to the 400 men raised for the Cartagena expedition, the colonies had to raise militias to defend their coastal towns and ports. Spanish attacks along the eastern seaboard were intended to disrupt shipping and loot port towns. These raids were continuous from 1741 to 1748.
The raids in North Carolina were made on Beaufort Town and Brunswick Town. The Spanish, finding little resistance ashore, attacked and plundered the town of Beaufort twice in 1747 and held it for three days. On 3 September 1748, three Spanish privateers dropped anchor off Brunswick and opened fire on the ships in the harbor. Other Spaniards attacked the town from the land side, drove out all of the inhabitants, and occupied the site. They looted the houses and destroyed property with no fear of reprisal.
The people of Brunswick recovered from their surprise, organized an armed force, and returned the attack. Catching the Spaniards off guard, they killed or captured a number of them and drove the rest to their ships. One of the Spanish ships, The Fortuna, fired on Brunswick, but was out of range of any guns the town had. Fire broke out aboard ship and The Fortuna blew up. Her commander, all of her officers, and most of her crew were drowned. The other ships hastily sailed down the river to Smith Island. Sending a flag of truce back to Brunswick, they sought an exchange of prisoners; as soon as this was accomplished, they disappeared at sea.
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Causes
The Spanish Alarm from 1739-1748 was based in the tensions between Britain and Spain and the War of Spanish Succession. Their struggle for a balance of power spilled into their respective colonial empires. This added to existing tensions of their disagreement as to the territorial boundaries of Georgia and Florida. Additionally Spain opposed English slave trafficking in the West Indies and its illegal lumbering in Honduras. Britain disliked the Spanish Guarda-costas, the Spanish coastal police force, because of their harsh methods used to manage and inspect shipping in Spain. "Hostilities between the rival settlements in Georgia and Florida were inevitable" (1). Ultimately, their differences resulted in the War of Jenkins' Ear, which began in 1739; it was fought in Europe, the West Indies, Americas, and both sides of the Atlantic.
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Reactions
In 1789, word had gotten out that there was a war between the British and the Spanish, and Carolina colonists were very excited.
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.
Specifically, the mercantile community looked forward to getting rid of Spanish influence.
When the conflicts had finally ended, however, South Carolinians were relieved; the warfare had not brought the hoped for benefits. "No sooner had the war begun than did Charleston merchants begin to consider methods by which they could gain from it"(162). The English colonists hoped to gain from the Spanish Alarm, but as the raids continued, the merchants realized their ill effects. Many colonists started to lose their enthusiasm, especially during the 1740s. 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" (163). The book Georgia Journeys stated that "the Spanish Alarm...was of great damage to the colony in retarding cultivation"(99).
British military support
The southern frontier (South Carolina and Georgia) received a majority of British military support because of petitions from South Carolina, Oglethorpe, a British general, and the Trustees for the Establishment of the Colony of Georgia in America, but the British Government's comparative neglect and long deliberation distressed the Trustees. In February 1737, Sir Robert Walpole wrote to Oglethorpe:
that he could form about 300 men capable of bearing arms in Georgia, that South Carolina had money but no men, that North Carolina had men but no money; that Pennsylvania had both, and Virginia only money. That New England had men but no money, and New York had money and few men.
It was in that year that real British support began. British ships were posted on the coast, and Vice-Admiral Edward Vernon was dispatched to destroy Spanish settlements in the West Indies. In October 1739, Oglethorpe was instructed to attack St. Augustine, and American naval commissioners were instructed to assist.
The two nations settled some of their differences in the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748. This effectively halted the Spanish excursions into the English Americas.
Sources
- Archives, North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources
- The Colonial and State Records of North Carolina, Volume XXII
- Sara Gober and Kenneth L. Coleman, Georgia Journeys: Being an Account of the Lives of Georgia's Original Settlers and Other Early Settlers (1961)
- P. M. Handover, The Second Cecil: The Rise to Power, 1563-1604 of Sir Robert Cecil, Late First Earl of Salisbury (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1959), 159, http://www.questiaschool.com/read/10497457.
- William S. Powell, and Michael Hill. The North Carolina Gazetteer: A Dictionary of Tar Heel Places and Their History. 2nd ed. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2010. http://www.questiaschool.com/read/121870112.
- Trevor R. Reese, "Britain's Military Support of Georgia in the War of 1739-1748," The Georgia Historical Quarterly, Vol. 43, No. 1 (March, 1959), pp. 1-10
- Stuart O. Stumph, "Implications of King George's War for the Charleston Mercantile Community," The South Carolina Historical Magazine, Vol. 77, No. 3 (Jul., 1976), pp. 161-188
- Carl E. Swanson, "American Privateering and Imperial Warfare, 1739-1748," The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, Vol. 42, No. 3 (Jul., 1985), pp. 357-382
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