1881 United States Senate special elections in New York March 4. On May 16, 1881, both U.S. Senators from New York resigned in protest against the distribution of federal patronage in New York by President James A. Garfield, a Half-Breed, without being consulted. The confrontation between the Stalwart and the Half-Breed (in the press now usually referred to as the "Administration men") factions of the Republican Party arose when the leader of the New Yorker Half-Breeds, President pro tempore of the State Senate William H. Robertson, was appointed Collector of the Port of New York, the highest paying federal office in New York. Conkling preferred that Collector Edwin Merritt
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