Spanberger's Awkward History Lesson

Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger chose the chambers of the House of Burgesses in Williamsburg as the backdrop for her Democratic response to President Trump’s State of the Union — and apparently hoped nobody would crack open a history book.

“In 1705,” she told the nation, “the people of the Virginia colony gathered here to take on the extraordinary task of governing themselves.” She painted the Burgesses as dreamers who imagined “a new nation, unlike anything the world had ever seen.”

Here’s what actually happened in that room in 1705: the House of Burgesses passed the Virginia Slave Codes — 41 sections of law that declared all non-Christian Africans to be slaves for life, classified human beings as real estate, banned interracial marriage, and imposed savage punishments on anyone who resisted. It was the most comprehensive codification of racial slavery in colonial America, a legal architecture so durable it endured until the Civil War. The “extraordinary task of governing themselves” that Spanberger celebrated was, in that very year and that very chamber, the extraordinary task of building a permanent slave system to protect the tobacco fortunes of the planter elite.

This isn’t obscure history. It’s the single most significant act of the 1705 session. Any competent speechwriter with a search engine could have found it. Yet Spanberger — a former CIA officer who presumably understands the value of intelligence — stood in that room and delivered a lecture about “rejecting the unacceptable excesses of poor leadership” without a seeming flicker of awareness that the men who sat in those chairs were legislating human trafficking.

This is the Democratic Party in miniature: wrapping itself in the language of freedom while standing, literally, in the house that slavery built — and expecting you not to notice. (Just like you are not supposed to notice that it was the party of slavery and that it was the first Republican President who freed the slaves.)

Next time, Governor, maybe check what laws were passed in the room before you turn it into a photo op.