David Bullock Harris

Who was David Bullock Harris?

David Bullock Harris was a colonel in the Confederate States Army during the American Civil War. Some early lists of Confederate generals showed Harris as a brigadier general. Nonetheless, no record of his promotion to this grade has been found. Harris served as an engineer, mostly under the command of General Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard. Harris planned and constructed the defenses of Centreville, Virginia, Fort Pillow, Island Number Ten, Vicksburg, Mississippi, Charleston, South Carolina and Petersburg, Virginia in the siege of that city's opening phase. Harris died of yellow fever at Summerville, South Carolina on October 10, 1864.

David B. Harris graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York in 1833. He served in the artillery branch of the U.S. Army and as an engineering instructor at West Point before resigning in 1835. Harris worked for the James River and Kanawha Canal Company for two years and then worked on railroad surveys. He became a tobacco farmer on a plantation in Goochland County, Virginia in 1845.