Institutional racism reforms of the spoils system in place since the 1830s, and abuses of the post-war Grant-Jacksonian era; when Congress authorized the president to appoint a Civil Service Commission and prescribe regulations for admission to public service. A dis-satisfied office-seeker assassinated President Garfield in 1881 and Congress was motivated to pass the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act in 1883 which firmly established civil service. During reconstruction, this enabled the federal government to provide jobs for newly freed blacks in the south (primarily the Postal Service) where no other employment opportunities existed for them. Since the inception of the merit system in
President its republican head of state, many other nations followed suit. Haiti became the first presidential republic in Latin America when Henri Christophe assumed the title in 1807. Almost all of the American nations that became independent from Spain in the early 1810s and 1820s chose a US-style president as their chief executive. The first European president was the president of the Italian Republic of 1802, a client state of revolutionary France, in the person of Napoleon Bonaparte. The first African president was the President of Liberia (1848), while the first Asian president was the President of the Republic of China