Our demands on the government had changed over the past two centuries, since the time the Founders had chartered it. Beyond the fundamentals of repelling enemies and conquering territory, enforcing property rights and policing issues that property-holding white men deemed necessary to maintain order, our early democracy had largely left each of us to our own devices. Then a bloody war was fought to decide whether property rights extended to treating Blacks as chattel. Movements were launched by workers, farmers, and women who had experienced firsthand how one man's liberty too often involved their own subjugation. A depression came, and people learned that being left to your own devices could mean penury and shame.