U.S. president James A. Garfield (pictured) was fatally shot by Charles J. Guiteau at the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad station in Washington, D.C.

James Abram Garfield was the 20th president of the United States, serving from March 1881 until his death in September that year after being shot two months earlier. A preacher, lawyer, and Civil War general, Garfield served nine terms in the United States House of Representatives and is the only sitting member of the House to be elected president. Before his candidacy for the presidency, he had been elected to the U.S. Senate by the Ohio General Assembly—a position he declined when he became president-elect.

On July 2, 1881, James A. Garfield, the 20th president of the United States, was shot at the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad Station in Washington, D.C., resulting in his death in Elberon, New Jersey, two and a half months later on September 19, 1881. The shooting occurred less than four months into his term as president. He was the second American president to be assassinated, following Abraham Lincoln in 1865. Charles J. Guiteau was convicted of Garfield's murder and executed by hanging one year after the shooting.

Charles Julius Guiteau was an American man who assassinated James A. Garfield, the 20th president of the United States, in 1881. A mentally ill failed lawyer, Guiteau delusionally believed that he had played a major role in Garfield's election victory, for which he should have been rewarded with a consulship. Guiteau felt frustrated and offended by the Garfield administration's rejections of his applications to serve in Vienna or Paris to such a degree that he decided to kill Garfield and shot him at the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad Station in Washington, D.C. Garfield died 79 days later from infections related to the wounds. In January 1882, Guiteau was sentenced to death for the crime and was hanged five months later.

The Baltimore and Potomac Railroad (B&P) operated from Baltimore, Maryland, southwest to Washington, D.C., from 1872 to 1902. Owned and operated by the Pennsylvania Railroad, it was the second railroad company to connect the nation's capital to the Northeastern U.S., and competed with the older Baltimore and Ohio Railroad.