Slavery in the colonial United States in the Caribbean: Guadeloupe and especially Saint-Domingue.) After the port of New Orleans was founded in 1718 with access to the Gulf Coast, French colonists imported more African slaves to the Illinois Country for use as agricultural or mining laborers. By the mid-eighteenth century, slaves accounted for as many as a third of the limited population in that rural area. Slavery was much more extensive in colonial Louisiana, where the French developed sugar cane plantations along the Mississippi river. Slavery was maintained during the French (1699 – 1763, and 1800 – 1803) and Spanish (1763 – 1800) periods of government.
West Florida Controversy bear in mind that in the transfer [of Louisiana to the United States] the identical language was employed that had been used in 1800, so that the government of the United States was subrogated, in express terms, to the rights of France and of Spain. … The United States insisted that by the treaty of 1800 Spain ceded the disputed territory [of West Florida], as part of Louisiana, to France, and that France, in turn, in 1803, ceded it to the United States. Spain, with equal earnestness and persistence, maintained that her cession to France comprehended what was at that