Florida was home of several Indian tribes, the Seminoles being the most important of them. There were also some missions and some military outposts, with Saint Augustine the most important of them, in the east, and with Pensacola, Mobile and Baton Rouge as the main towns in the west. In this western region were the most settlements, mostly based on small plantations run by French nobles or former commoners from New Granada, among other places.
There were also a few villages of free Negroes. Either escaped or freed from Georgia or the Spanish Antilles, Christianized by Spanish missioners, they are recognized as free subjects of the Spanish Empire. Not all Negroes in Florida are free. The plantations have a small slave population, and some Georgians are settling in Florida, and some of them have brought their chattel with them. Georgians are required, however, to an oath of loyalty to the king of Spain and conversion to the Catholic faith to be given property rights or not being subject to expulsion.
Georgians are worried by those Negro villages. If an escaped slave manages to reach any of those villages, he or she would have protection by the Spanish authorities. And the Spanish authorities are not precisely collaborative to turn back an escaped slave before they reach a Negro community. Most times, Georgians just raid over the border to chase the escaped chattel and turning them back without reporting to the Spanish authorities.
It was August 12th 1799. The two sons of a Georgian small plantation owner took their riffles and crossed the border to chase an escapee. A Spanish patrol saw them and shoot a warning, the two young shoot back and after a short shooting the young Americans laid dead.
When the voice reached town back in Gerogia, a mob formed and near one hundred angry Americans crossed the border, stormed on the small town of Las Aguas and burned it down.
The governor in Saint Augustine sent a complain note to the Georgian governor in Louisville, but as the letter traveled north, the mob just burned down another Spanish town and near two hundred angry Georgians were now heading to a third town.
This time three hundred regulars from Saint Augustine were waiting the Georgian mob. The news of the massacre reached Louisville before the complain letter, with details on the location shifted a few miles north, and Georgia declared war to Spain.