Scope and Content Note
The papers of Daniel Webster Whittle (1840-1901) span the years 1861-1974, with the bulk of the material produced during the period 1861-1865. They consist of biographical sketches, correspondence, court records, maps, military orders, a diary, dinner menu, photograph, poem, and tax list.
Whittle was born in Chicopee Falls, Massachusetts, and moved to Chicago shortly before the outbreak of the Civil War. Raising a company of volunteers at the Chicago Board of Trade, he served as a Union officer in the Seventy-second Illinois Volunteer Regiment, eventually attaining the rank of major. He served with General O. O. Howard and was with William T. Sherman on his March to the Sea. Whittle was wounded at Vicksburg, Mississippi, and was discharged when the war ended before he had fully recovered. After the war he was a business manager for the Elgin Watch Company and in 1874, at the invitation of Dwight Lyman Moody, became a traveling evangelist. Writing under the pseudonym El Nathan, he was also a prolific writer of gospel songs, the best known being Moment by Moment, written in 1893 with his daughter, Mary Whittle Moody.
The Whittle Papers deal almost exclusively with Whittle's Civil War military service as an officer assigned to the Headquarters Department of the Army of the Tennessee. They contain official correspondence, field orders, and general orders concerning troop movements, complaints from local citizens about looting by Union soldiers, prisoner exchanges, and routine military matters. Included in some letters are marginalia by William T. Sherman and Ulysses S. Grant. The papers also contain material pertaining to cases heard by Whittle as a military judge advocate and a diary that he kept during the latter months of the war detailing local conditions in western Georgia and eastern Alabama and the transition from military to civilian law.