Another writer carries the vindication of the frontiersmen and pioneers still further by attributing culpability to the United States government for not providing remote settlements with legal tribunals, so that recourse to lynch-law would have been unnecessary. He writes: “The greater share of the sin and disgrace falls upon the government, which leaves to its citizens a heavy and responsible office, that ought to be guarded by all the solemnities and securities of law.”[229] Such are the arguments and the lines of reasoning by which the operation of lynch-law previous to the Civil War was generally justified.[230] Vindication was urged on grounds of necessity or self-preservation and the nature of the offense, and it was lynch-law as applied to whites that was thus vindicated. The anti-slavery agitation and the emancipation of the slaves brought to the support of lynch-law procedure another factor—that of race prejudice. The number of negroes lynched in recent years as compared with the number of whites lynched has indicated so clearly the existence of race prejudice that many writers have given to it the chief place among the causes of lynchings. It is a mistake, however, to consider this race prejudice as of recent origin in the United States. Race prejudice between the whites and the negroes in this country began with the landing of the first ship-load of slaves in Virginia. In describing the condition of the negroes in the colony of Virginia, George W. Williams says: “It was not a mitigating circumstance that the white servants of the colony who came into natural contact with the Negroes were ‘disorderly persons,’ or convicts sent to Virginia by an order of the King of England. It was fixed by public sentiment and law that there should be no relation between the races. The first prohibition was made September 17, 1630. Hugh Davis, a white servant, was publicly flogged ‘before an assembly of Negroes and others,’ for defiling himself with a Negro. It was also required that he should confess as much on the following Sabbath.... All intercourse was cut off between the races. Intermarrying of whites and blacks was prohibited by severe laws. And the most common civilities and amenities were frowned down when intended for a Negro. The plantation was as religious as the Church, and the Church was as secular as the plantation. The ‘white Christians’ hated the Negro, and the Church bestowed upon him a most bountiful amount of neglect.”[231]