[Sidenote: Their common charter.] These two companies were at first organized under a single charter. Each was to be governed by a council in England appointed by the king, and these councils were to appoint councils of thirteen to reside in the colonies, with powers practically unlimited. Nevertheless the king covenanted with his colonists as follows: Also we do, for us, our heirs and successors, declare by these presents that all and every the persons, being our subjects, which shall go and inhabit within the said colony and plantation, and every their children and posterity, which shall happen to be born within any of the limits thereof, shall have and enjoy all liberties, franchises, and immunities of free denizens and natural subjects within any of our other dominions, to all intents and purposes as if they had been abiding and born within this our realm of England, or in any other of our dominions. This principle, that British subjects born in America should be entitled to the same political freedom as if born in England, was one upon which the colonists always insisted, and it was the repeated and persistent attempts of George III. to infringe it that led the American colonies to revolt and declare themselves independent of Great Britain. [Sidenote: Dissolution of the two companies.] [Sidenote: Settlement of the three zones.] Both the companies founded in 1606 were short-lived. In 1620 the Plymouth Company got a new charter, which made it independent of the London Company. In 1624 the king, James I., quarreled with the London Company, brought suit against it in court, and obtained from the subservient judges a decree annulling its charter. In 1635 the reorganized Plymouth Company surrendered its charter to Charles I. in pursuance of a bargain which need not here concern us.[1] But the creation of these short-lived companies left an abiding impression upon the map of North America and upon the organization of civil government in the United States. Let us observe what was done with the three strips or zones into which the country was divided: the northern or New England zone, assigned to the Plymouth Company; the southern or Virginia zone, assigned to the London Company; and the central zone, for which the two companies were, so to speak, to run a race. [Footnote 1: See my _Beginnings of New England_, p. 112.] [Sidenote: 1. the northern zone.] [Sidenote: 2. The southern zone.] In 1663 Charles II. cut off the southern part of Virginia, the area covering the present states of North and South Carolina and Georgia, and it was formed into a new province called Carolina. In 1729 the two groups of settlements which had grown up along its coast were definitively separated into North and South Carolina; and in 1732 the frontier portion toward Florida was organized into the colony of Georgia. Thus four of the original thirteen states--Virginia, the two Carolinas, and Georgia--were constituted in the southern zone.