On 12 February 1733, James Oglethorpe led a small band of 114 men, women and children to Yamacraw Bluff, a point overlooking the south bank of the Savannah River. There, Oglethorpe organized a small settlement he and the others named Savannah. The new town served as the capital of a new colony, Georgia, which had been granted a royal charter the year before and was intended from an imperial perspective to serve as a buffer zone and guard for the more prosperous colony of South Carolina.

By 1733, the threat to the rapidly growing colony of South Carolina from Spanish St Augustine was slight. Yet many in Britain and Charleston felt that Georgia could serve an important purpose. First, it would make the journey to St Augustine and freedom much more difficult for runaway Carolina slaves, a problem that had escalated over the previous decades. Second, Georgia would serve as a base from which to launch military attacks on St Augustine should the need arise. This later design, indeed, was realized as the region between Georgia and Florida witnessed Oglethorpe's unsuccessful siege of St Augustine in 1740 and the disastrous Spanish defeat at Bloody Marsh in 1742. Both of these battles occurred during the War of Jenkins's Ear from 1739 to 1742, after which the war was subsumed into the larger War of Austrian Succession.