I’ve watched every Virginia governor’s inauguration for the past 30 years. For most of those, I covered them on-site as a reporter or editor. They’ve ranged from perfectly serviceable to pretty doggone good. 

But what Abigail Davis Spanberger did Saturday in the first minutes of her term as governor soared past them all. 

Not since t h e i n a u guration of L. Douglas Wilder as the nation’s first elected Black governor 36 years ago has the day been as heavily freighted with history as it was for Spanberger — the first woman to govern Virginia in more than four centuries as a colony or a commonwealth. Never had Virginians heard their leader speak as a daughter, a wife, a sister, a mother. 

In content, tone and delivery, she comfortably and confidently rendered an address for the ages — one that rose to the importance of the occasion, rich in lines that will be quoted for generations to come. 

For Virginians, it blended the sweet optimism of President Ronald Reagan’s “shining city on a hill” valedictory and President John F. Kennedy’s stirring “Ask not” exhortation to Americans’ collective and individual commitment to country. 

Under leaden skies against a damp winter chill, her sunny 25-minute address took in the vast sweep of Virginia’s history — for better and for worse — and paired it seamlessly to today’s divisive strife and tomorrow’s daunting challenges for her and her government. 

She noted the commonwealth’s first two governors, Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefferson, and cited Henry’s 1799 admonition in his final public speech — “United we stand, divided we fall” — that is as urgent now as it was at our republic’s birth. 

Dressed in suffragette white and standing as the ultimate triumph of their cause, Spanberger saluted women who risked harassment and arrest on the same Capitol steps a century earlier advocating for women’s right to vote. 

On the eve of the holiday celebrating the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, she noted King’s daring 1960 speech in Richmond urging Gov. Lindsay Almond to end Massive Resistance, Virginia’s disgraceful and futile effort to defy the Supreme Court’s 1954 ruling to desegregate public schools. 

Spanberger recognized Wilder, who is descended from enslaved grandparents and was in attendance on his 95th birthday. Wilder’s 1990 inauguration packed Capitol Square — a realization of King’s dream. 

She honored the memory of Linwood Holton, Virginia’s first Republican governor, who served notice in his 1970 inaugural speech that Virginia would, at last, embrace racial equality, not just as the law but as a value. Seated nearby, Holton’s daughter, former first lady Anne Holton, fought back tears as her husband, U.S. Sen. and former Gov. Tim Kaine, comforted her. 

When she shifted to the present, Spanberger confronted the administration of President Donald Trump and the “recklessness coming out of Washington” without once uttering his name. She addressed Virginians’ concerns head on. 

“You are worried about policies that are hurting our communities, cutting health care access, imperiling rural hospitals, and driving up costs,” she said. Affordability was the centerpiece of her campaign and is now the focus of her term. 

“You are worried about Washington policies that are closing off markets, hurting innovation and private industry, and attacking those who have devoted their lives to public service,” she said, referring to Trump’s schedule of punitive tariffs and federal job cuts in a state that is home to 330,000 federal government workers. 

“You are worried about an administration that is gilding buildings while schools crumble, breaking the social safety net and sowing fear across our communities, betraying the values of who we are as Americans, the very values that we celebrate here on these steps,” she said. No elaboration is necessary. 

Then she spoke without equivocation to the dispute roiling the nation, causing massive midwinter protests in cities across America, knowing her words might escalate the vindictive president’s reprisals. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents were spotted operating last week in Petersburg and Henrico County. 

“And in Virginia,” Spanberger said, “our hard-working, law-abiding immigrant neighbors will know that when we say that we will focus on the security and safety of all of our neighbors, we mean them, too.” 

Does such a powerful oratorical start presage a successful term? Oh, were it so easy. 

She has staked out an ambitious agenda, and she’s got 1,454 days and nights to achieve it. Many will be difficult, frustrating and thankless. There are unknown crises that, as often as not, hijack a governor’s term and define his — now her — legacy. 

But at least for the moment, Abigail Spanberger has pointed Virginia toward a new destination, and she has inspired us to follow her there. 

This commentary originally appeared on VirginiaMercury.com, where this writer is a columnist.