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.
Freemasonry in Spain of France]] or the Traditional and Symbolic Grand Lodge among others. [[File:GOI sello.jpg|thumb|200px | left | Seal of the Grand Orient of Iberia]] Similarly, in 2001, the Grand Orient of Iberia, a liberal obedience which, like the Symbolic Grand Lodge of Spain, welcomes male, female and mixed lodges and works mostly in the [[French Rite]] both in the Iberian peninsula and in Mexico and France. In 2010 it had thirteen lodges, with one in Mexico City and two in Paris. In 2007, the Iberian United Grand Lodge, an obedience which observed traditional regularity but not recognised by the United Grand