In Memoriam: President Garfield's Funeral March newspaperboys shouting the news of Garfield's death. Shocked, he left his bed and went for a long walk through Washington. By the next morning he had composed the melody for what would be called "In Memoriam: President Garfield's Funeral March". On returning home, he committed it to paper. "In Memoriam" was one of only two compositions Sousa dedicated to American presidents, the other was "President Garfield's Inauguration March", composed earlier in the year 1881 for the occasion of Garfield's inauguration. "In Memoriam" was performed by "the President's Own" United States Marine Band, under Sousa's direction, as Garfield's body arrived 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