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INSPIRATIONAL PAGES
JUST WHEN YOU THOUGHT YOU DIDN'T COUNT
Once upon a time...in the big little state of Rhode Island...they were electing a state legislature. There was a thrifty Federalist farmer who started for the polls late in the afternoon and, on the way, heard the squealing of a pig. He looked around to see the pig with its head caught in the mesh of an old wire fence. Hogs often will kill and eat a trapped pig. So the farmer stopped to rescue the porker and was too late at the polls.
Now, wait a minute. The Federalist farmer was too late to vote...and...the election was decided by a one-vote margin in favor of the Democrats. If the farmer had been at the voting place in time, the Democrat would not have been elected.
At the following session of the legislature (these were the days when the legislatures elected our Senators) a Democrat was sent to the Senate from Rhode Island by a one-vote margin in the legislature. Try to keep up with this. The legislator was elected by one vote and his one vote elected a Senator.
And in the United States Senate the vote that we should go to war with England was carried by the one Democrat margin. So the Revolutionary War was fought because...a Rhode Island pig got caught in a fence.
Dr. George Benson of Harding College traced this sequence: One morning in 1844 a grain miller in De Kalb County, Indiana, was walking toward his mill. It was election day, but he had work to do and did not intend to vote. Before he reached the mill, however, he was stopped by friends who persuaded him to go to the polls. As it happened the candidate for whom he voted won a seat in the state legislature...by a margin of one vote.
When the Indiana Legislature convened, the man elected from De Kalb cast the deciding vote that sent Edward Allen Hannegan to the United States Senate. Then, in the United States Senate the question of statehood for Texas came up...the result was a tie vote. But Senator Hannegan, presiding as President pro tempore, cast the deciding vote from the chair. So Texas was admitted to the Union because a miller in De Kalb County, Indiana, went ten minutes out of his way to cast his one vote...just one vote.
You want more?
Thomas Jefferson was elected President by one vote in the Electoral College.
So was John Quincy Adams.
And so was Rutherford B. Hayes...elected President...by one vote.
One vote gave statehood to California, Idaho, Oregon, Texas, and Washington.
All those people in all those states are United States of Americans because of somebody's one vote.
Kentucky came into the Union as a slave state...by the casting of one majority vote in the Constitutional Convention. Had it not been for the one vote, Kentucky would have entered the Union a free state. If it had, Missouri, largely settled by Kentuckians, would have done likewise.
In that event there probably never would have been a war between the states.
And closer to home...the Draft Act of World War II...passed in the House of Representatives...by just one vote.
