Viii EDITOR'S PREFACE.
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.