It may seem quaint, but for answers, we could take time to read some history. Some events, usually unanticipated, cause seismic breaks in time. Two such prior crises, when leaders were challenged to preserve and reimagine the America they had inherited, offer particularly relevant lessons. In 1854, the year Abraham Lincoln burst out of political quietude to oppose the expansion of slavery, he said this: “The legitimate object of government is to do for the community of people, whatever they need to have done, but cannot do at all, or cannot so well do for themselves—in their separate and individual capacities.” That Lincoln quote became a favorite of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s, as he moved toward a bold and experimental use of government to save the American economy in the 1930s.

These greatest of our national crises—the eras of the Civil War and Reconstruction, and of the Great Depression and World War II—are replete with the guidance we now crave. Whatever we call the multitrillion-dollar package about to emerge from Congress—Big Government, emergency relief, stimulus, federal overreach, tyranny—it stems from social “necessity,” a word used ubiquitously in the 1860s and the 1930s. The creation of massive armies, the emancipation of enslaved people, and the energetic imagining of what their freedom would mean—direct aid to people, the creation of public works and jobs, and the mobilization of industry for national ends—all became matters of military or human necessity.

All across the country, Americans are responding to the shock of events, and wondering how this public-health crisis and economic collapse hit so suddenly. And we are once again, as in 1861 and 1933, struggling in fear to understand whether our political institutions, our moral imagination, and our leadership are equipped to respond. In whom and in what do we believe? How should we act in our social isolation? Are our institutions of medicine, public health, education, banking, and politics a match not merely for a virus but for the social collapse that has come with its infection?

Individualism runs extremely deep in the American mind and culture. But it is in our most profound crises that we discover, against the suspicions and beliefs of millions, that government can be our friend, even our savior.

Near the end of the Civil War, President Lincoln admitted: “I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me.” (How we now yearn for that kind of humility from our leaders in high places.) Those leaders who have been forced to answer the question of what governments owe people in existential crises are tested not only on their courage and intellect, but on whether they are capable of the humility necessary to see a “whole,” as the conflict-resolution specialist Donna Hicks writes, where “everyone matters.”