The southern theater of the American Revolutionary War was the central theater of military operations in the second half of the American Revolutionary War, 1778–1781. It encompassed engagements primarily in Virginia, Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina. Tactics consisted of both strategic battles and guerrilla warfare. During the first three years of the conflict, 1775–1778, the largest military encounters between Continental Army and the British Army had been in the New England and Middle colonies, around Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. After the failure of the Saratoga campaign, the British Army largely abandoned operations in the north and pursued peace through control of the Southern Colonies. In the South, the conflict began much as it did in the North, with British authorities attempting to disarm the growing Patriot militias. On April 20, 1775, a day after Lexington and Concord, the British Royal Governor of Virginia ordered British sailors to secure the store of gunpowder at Williamsburg. Patrick Henry led a small militia force to Williamsburg to recapture the gunpowder, but unlike Lexington and Concord, there was no fighting during this “Gunpowder Incident.” Instead, the British merely paid for the powder and both sides backed down. The British had additional motives for the South as southern products such as tobacco, rice, and indigo were important to British merchants.

British strategists saw the Carolinas, Georgia, East Florida, the Bahamas and Bermuda as an important post-war trade grouping and an integral part of the West Indies sugar trade. Savannah and, more importantly, Charleston would fit well into such a grouping. Charleston was coveted, especially, as the most important southern port and the fourth largest and richest city in North America. The fall of Charleston on May 12, 1780, was perhaps the worst defeat Americans suffered during the entire Revolution. Subsequent British victories at the Waxhaws, Camden, and Fishing Creek eliminated much of the southern Continental army and made the British confident that the South was theirs. Events in the North and South led to a feeling of Patriot desperation by the summer of 1780. The New England colonies produced many of the same products and goods as the British Isles, but the Southern colonies were a different story. Rice, indigo, tobacco, and other cash crops abounded. The institution of slavery helped to keep the prices of these products low, and British mercantilism could profit from cornering the market and selling the goods for substantial profits. Georgia Royal Governor James Wright nominally remained in power until January 1776, when the unexpected arrival of British ships near Savannah prompted the local Committee of Safety to order his arrest. South Carolina's population was politically divided when the war began.

The Lowcountry communities, dominated by Charleston, sided strongly with the Patriots, while the backcountry held a large number of Loyalist sympathizers. Patriots in Georgia attempted several times to defeat the British garrison that was based at Saint Augustine in British East Florida. This garrison actively supported the activities of Loyalists who fled there from Georgia and other southern states and were responsible for raiding cattle and other supplies in southern Georgia. On April 19, 1778, three row galleys of the Georgia Navy engaged, defeated, and captured a Royal Navy brigantine, an armed British East Florida provincial sloop, and an armed brig. On December 29, 1778, a British expeditionary corps of 3,500 men from New York, under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Archibald Campbell, captured Savannah, Georgia. In October 1779, French and Continental Army forces tried to retake Savannah. Under the leadership of Lincoln, and with the assistance of a French naval squadron commanded by Comte d'Estaing, it was a spectacular failure. With the surrender at Yorktown, the full participation of French forces in that battle, and the resulting loss of Cornwallis's army, the British war effort ground to a halt.