A Single Vote

Election fever has come to Whit's End. Horace Higgenbotham is running for class president, and he has drawn a big crowd for his campaign speech, though John Avery Whittaker admits that the free ice cream samples may have something to do with the turnout. Tom Riley thinks the speech was a real barn burner and promises Horace his support. Connie Kendall is not nearly so impressed. She has been hearing about the election all day at school, and now she has to hear about it at work too. When Whit asks why she is so uninterested, Connie tells him that school elections are nothing but popularity contests, and that even in real elections one single vote never makes a difference.

Whit says that she has clearly never heard the story of Jamison Shoemaker, an Indiana farmer who lived more than 150 years ago. The story, oddly enough, begins in Texas.

On a cold December day in 1845, Sam Houston waits in his office with his aide Homer while a crowd gathers outside, all of them watching the lonely road from the north. A courier finally arrives with a crumpled message from Stephen Austin, and Houston refuses to read it alone. Texas, the letter announces, has become the twenty eighth state in the Union. Statehood needed thirty six votes in the Senate, and it passed by a margin of exactly one. The deciding ballot came from a senator from Indiana named Harrigan, a man everyone had assumed was against them.

Connie is unconvinced. Senators have power, she says, so of course a senator's vote counts. So Whit turns the clock back to Indiana in 1839, where legislators have gathered in Indianapolis to choose a senator. Madison Marsh listens to his two advisers argue: Mr. Baehr pushes for Tyler Zumwalt, while Mr. Lang insists on Rothschild, and each cheerfully points out the other candidate's faults. Marsh raises a third name, Harrigan, and both advisers warn that the man is untried and untested. When the ballots are counted the result is a three way tie, and with one member ill and another absent, the deciding vote falls to Marsh alone. He casts it for James Harrigan.

Two years earlier still, in 1837, Jamison Shoemaker is out plowing his field when his neighbor Richard Reynolds comes whooping across the fresh furrows with news that today, not tomorrow, is election day. Shoemaker races to town and reaches the polling place at four fifty five, where Thompson is stubbornly keeping the doors open until five o'clock because the rules say so, and Jones is just as stubbornly ready to go home. The official ballots have run out, so Shoemaker writes his choice on a plain scrap of paper and drops it in the box. The count comes back 218 to 217, and the winner is Madison Marsh.

One ordinary farmer's homemade ballot elected Marsh, Marsh elected Harrigan, and Harrigan made Texas a state. Connie calls it a remarkable coincidence, but Whit disagrees. Every one of those men believed something and acted on it, and God used what they did to work out his own plan. Whit calls it providential rather than strange, and reminds Connie that people only see the here and now while God sees the whole picture. Connie needs time to think it over. Horace, meanwhile, has found the perfect story for his campaign.