and affections; and he preserved not only with fidelity, but enthusiasm, the republican principles with which he began life.
Remaining a year in France, Mr. Wheaton returned to America in 1847. He was at once appointed Lecturer on International Law at Harvard University, and was to have had the professorship, then about to be founded and permanently endowed for him, of Civil and International Law: but rapidly declining health obliged him to break off from all his labors; and he died at Dorchester, in Massachusetts, on the 11th March, 1848.
During the twenty years that Mr. Wheaton resided abroad in the diplomatic service, he was engaged in negotiations of great importance to his own country and Europe. He conducted the well-known controversy respecting the captures at Kiel, which ended in the Treaty of Indemnity of 1830 (see this work, §§ 530–537), and led the way to other treaties of indemnity to the United States, based on a similar principle. While at Copenhagen, he was practically the American representative for all Germany, as we had no minister in Prussia or Austria, or any other of the German States; and he gave constant attention to the internal concerns as well as the foreign policy of those powers. For many years he observed carefully the affairs of the Zollverein, and succeeded at last in effecting the treaty of 1844, which was thought by diplomatists and publicists to do him great honor, and the rejection of which by the United States Senate caused him no little regret,—the more, perhaps, from the fact that its defeat was understood to have been an accident of party politics, against the judgment of the ablest men of the country.
