First International Conference of American States And so, as Secretary of State, Blaine sent invitations to all the nations of the Hemisphere to come to Washington in November 1881 with the principal goal of considering and discussing methods to prevent war between the nations of the Hemisphere. But destiny intervened: President Garfield was assassinated on 19 September 1881 and the new President Chester A. Arthur, who was no friend of Blaine's, quickly removed him from the State Department. Shortly afterward, the Conference invitations were withdrawn on the grounds that the unsettled situation at home and abroad would make such an event impossible. Now a private citizen,
SS Coptic (1881) Steam Ship Company ("Toyo Kisen Kabushiki Kaisha") of Yokohama, Japan, and renamed Persia Maru. She continued plying the trans-Pacific route through 1922, when she was transferred to the Tokyo–Netherlands East Indies route. She was laid up in Yokohama in December 1924 and her fittings were auctioned off. In 1926, the Oriental Steam Ship Company merged with the Japan Mail Shipping Line (NYK), and after a 44-year career, "Persia Maru" was scrapped in Osaka, Japan, in 1926. SS Coptic (1881) SS "Coptic" was a steamship built in 1881, which was successively owned by the Oceanic Steam Navigation Company, the Pacific Mail