The monument to Confederate Brigadier General John Pegram is at the Civil War Trust’s Hatcher’s Run site on Dabney Mill Road southwest of Petersburg, Virginia. (37.124846° N, 77.496985° W; map)

John Pegram was a career army officer who had attended West Point (USMA 1854), graduating with J.E.B. Stuart and Oliver O. Howard. He served on the western frontier with the dragoons, was Assistant Instructor of Cavalry at West Point, and went to Europe for a year to observe the Austro-Sardinian War. He resigned his commission in May of 1861 and became lieutenant colonel of the 20th Virginia Infantry.

Pegram was forced to surrender his regiment in the Rich Mountain Campaign, becoming the first former U.S. Army officer to be captured as a Confederate. He spent six months in a Federal prison before being paroled. Promoted to brigadier general in November of 1862, his command of cavalry in the Western Theater was heavily criticized. In an unusual move, he was transferred to command of an infantry brigade in Early’s Second Corps of the Army of Northern Virginia. (Lee was famous for exiling underperforming officers to the west, so such a ‘reverse move’ is surprising.)

Pegram was wounded commanding a brigade at the Battle of the WIlderness, but returned in the fall where he excelled as a division commander at the Battles of Winchester and Cedar Creek. When the Second Corps returned to the Richmond area in 1865 Pregram took the opportunity to marry the beautiful Hetty Carry in what was Richmond’s social event of the season. Three weeks later he would return to the church for his funeral after he was killed at Hatcher’s Run.

John Pegram’s younger brother William served in the artillery. William would be killed ten weeks after John and only nine miles away at the Battle of Five Forks.

From the monument:

Near this site

Brigadier General
John Pegram

was killed in the
Battle of Hatcher’s Run
on February 6, 1865

(return to the main Hatcher’s Run page)