General James A. Garfield, President of the United States, Died at Elberson, N.J., September 19, 1881, at 10:35 pm

This portrait of a the 20th president of the United States is based on a photograph by Matthew Brady-Levin C. Handy of ca. 1870-80. The printed copyright date of 1880 suggests that preparations for the print began when Garfield was elected, but the information in the the latter half of the title indicates that this state was issued after the subject's death. Garfield was a brigadier general in the United States army during the Civil War, and entered congress in 1862.

The New York firm of Currier & Ives (established by Nathaniel Currier, who formed a partnership with his brother-in-law James Merritt Ives in 1857), lithographed 4,300 subjects between 1835 and 1907 for distribution across America and Europe. They offered images of almost everything animal, vegetable, or mineral in the United States, and issued landscapes, genre subjects, caricatures, portraits, historical scenes, foreign views and reproductions of art works. The pictures were drawn on lithographic stones, printed in monochrome, then generally hand-colored by women who worked for the firm at home.