U.S. President James Garfield, who had only taken office a few months before, passed into history on September 19, 1881. The next day, Canadians expressed their respect for America and its fallen leader. this date in 1881. Our nation’s Governor General, John Douglas Sutherland Campbell, Marquess of Lorne, joined by Prime Minister Sir John A. Macdonald and his ministers, ordered that the flags on all public buildings, and on ships, be hoisted to half-mast until after President Garfield’s State Funeral. Notices were published in the newspapers across the young Dominion “for the calamity which has befallen the great nation with whom the Dominion is connected by so many ties of friendship and of kindred.” The press also noted that military installations like Fort Henry in Kingston and at the Citadel in Quebec City, were also honouring the slain President.
Arthur Milnes is an accomplished public historian and award-winning journalist. He was research assistant on The Rt. Hon. Brian Mulroney’s best-selling Memoirs and also served as a speechwriter to then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper and as a Fellow of the Queen’s Centre for the Study of Democracy under the leadership of Tom Axworthy. A resident of Kingston, Ontario, Milnes serves as the in-house historian at the 175 year-old Frontenac Club Hotel.