[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.

To this group some writers add Maryland, founded in 1632, because its territory had been claimed by the London Company; but the earliest settlements in Maryland, its principal towns, and almost the whole of its territory, come north of latitude 38 deg. and within the middle zone.

[Sidenote:  3.  The middle zone.] Between the years 1614 and 1621 the Dutch founded their colony of New Netherland upon the territory included between the Hudson and Delaware rivers, or, as they quite naturally called them, the North and South rivers.  They pushed their outposts up the Hudson as far as the site of Albany, thus intruding far into the northern zone.  In 1638 Sweden planted a small colony upon the west side of Delaware Bay, but in 1655 it was surrendered to the Dutch.  Then in 1664 the English took New Netherland from the Dutch, and Charles II. granted the province to his brother, the Duke of York.  The duke proceeded to grant part of it to his friends, Berkeley and Carteret, and thus marked off the new colony of New Jersey.  In 1681 the region west of New Jersey was granted to William Penn, and in the following year Penn bought from the Duke of York the small piece of territory upon which the Swedes had planted their colony.  Delaware thus became an appendage to Penn’s greater colony, but was never merged in it.  Thus five of the original thirteen states—­Maryland, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware—­were constituted in the middle zone.