He gained a reputation for his scholarly looks—extreme nearsightedness required that he wear his gold-rimmed spectacles even in the heat of battle–and for his utter fearlessness in battle.

Willy Pegram rose through the ranks from private to colonel of artillery in command of sixty guns.

Lee replied: "I think a man of 25 is as good as he ever will be; what he acquires after that age is from experience; but I can't understand, when an officer is doing excellent service where he is, why he should want to change."

Willy Pegram once stated, "Men, whenever the enemy takes a gun from my battery, look for my dead body in front of it."

On April 1, 1865, at the Battle of Five Forks - a battle Southern historian Douglas Southall Freeman deemed "a day of disaster not to be recorded solely in terms of four guns lost or of good soldiers captured" - Pegram finally suffered the loss of one of his guns while he lay mortally wounded beside it.

General Joseph R. Anderson, of Tredegar Iron Works fame, married Pegram's sister Mary Evans in 1881.