Sergeant Major David Huff of the 17th Georgia Infantry was a member of field and staff—people who worked with the commanding officers to convey messages, organize supplies, monitor positions, disburse pay, and tend to other duties necessary to move troops. It was not a safe position but not the most dangerous either. On July 2 in the cauldron of the Rose Woods and Wheatfield, it was a terrible position to have—two members of the regimental F&S were mortally wounded, and three more were wounded. David Huff was shot in the thigh and hips; he was captured and later tended to on the John Edward Plank farm where he died July 7. Unlike most of the Confederate dead, his family claimed his body in the late 1860s and reinterred in his family plot in Columbus, Georgia.

David came from deep Southern roots—his parents were from North Carolina, married there, and had several of their children there. In the early 1840s, they came to Columbus, a town only newly incorporated in 1828. They were prominent enough that David’s sister, Elizabeth, would be remembered in her obituary as the daughter of some of the “early settlers” of the town.

David was the middle of five children that included three boys and two girls. His family were active in the local Presbyterian Church, and his father has the title of reverend in some documents, though professionally he was a well-known merchant. John Munn appears in more than 600 newspaper advertisements in the 1860s in which he sold products ranging from insurance to hay to (most notably) cotton. The Huffs were slave holders, keeping three enslaved women ages 19, 32, and 59.

David and his older brother, John Jr., enlisted in 1861, but in different units—David went to the 17th Georgia while John went to the 2nd Georgia. John didn’t make it through the fall of 1861, dying of illness in Virginia.

David’s younger brother William later enlisted in the Pemberton Cavalry. There are no records of his ending, but his sister later said she lost all three of her brothers in the War.

In the end, the Huff family was left devastated at the conclusion of the War—all three sons killed, their livelihood nearly wiped out. John Huff lived another nine years before passing; his widow lasted two more after that.