Wilson is one of six children of C. Ellis Henican, Sr., and the former Elizabeth Cleveland, who are entombed at All Saints Mausoleum in New Orleans. She was reared in the Uptown section of New Orleans. A brother, C. Ellis Henican, Jr., a Tulane University Law School graduate, practiced law in New Orleans for fifty-seven years until his death at the age of eighty-one; he taught securities regulation at Loyola University New Orleans College of Law and was married until her death to the former Patricia McGraw. Her other siblings are Alice H. Perrier, the widow of Claude Perrier; Dorothy H. Heidingsfelder, wife of Charles Heidingsfelder, and Joseph Henican, whose wife is also named Margaret. One of her nephews, Ellis Henican, is a Fox News Channel contributor. Henican graduated in 1955 from the Academy of the Sacred Heart in New Orleans and in 1959 from the Roman Catholic-affiliated Barat College in Lake Forest, Illinois, thirty miles north of Chicago. After teaching in parochial schools, she operated from 1980 to 1985 the public relations firm in New Orleans, Peggy Wilson & Associates. Henican married attorney Gordon F. Wilson, Jr.. The couple has two sons, Gordon Peter Wilson and Carter Cleveland Wilson.
Political life
Peggy Wilson was elected to the city council in 1986 for District A, which includes the Lakeview neighborhood. She defeated the DemocratJoseph V. DiRosa, a former at-large council member who had been allied with former MayorVictor Schiro and narrowly lost the 1978 mayoral election to Ernest Nathan Morial, the first African American in that position. Wilson introduced the referendum which enacted term limits for the city council and mayor with 67 percent voter approval. Herself term-limited in 1994, Wilson switched to one of the two at-large seats, along with Jim Singleton, an African-American Democrat who served on the council for a total of twenty-four years. In her career in municipal government, Wilson was called the "watchdog" of the city council. She was frequently at odds with the mayors, the city administrators, and her council colleagues but served as council president. She was unseated in the at-large seat in 1998 by Singleton and Eddie L. Sapir, another Democrat. In 1988, Wilson played an influential role in locating the 1988 Republican National Convention to New Orleans, at which the Bush-Quayle ticket was nominated to run against the Democrat Dukakis-Bentsen slate. In 1991, Wilson lost a race for Louisianainsurance commissioner, a position vacated earlier in the year by Doug Green, who faced multiple federal corruption charges and landed a long prison sentence. Her principal opponent was James H. "Jim" Brown, originally from Concordia Parish, a former state senator and the Louisiana Secretary of State from 1980 to 1988. Brown led in the primary with 572,719 votes. Wilson trailed with 435,355 votes. Former Commissioner Sherman A. Bernard, another Democrat, drew 270,749 votes. Two other Democrats and two other Republicans shared the remaining 11 percent of the ballots. In the general election on November 16, in which Democrat former GovernorEdwin Edwards defeated David Duke for the governorship, Brown secured a large victory over Wilson. He polled 1,002,038 to her 674,097. Wilson lost Orleans Parish by a wide margin but carried the suburban parishes of Jefferson, St. Bernard, and St. Tammany. She outpolled Duke, who was a drag on the other Republican candidates that year, by some three thousand votes though Duke carried more than a dozen mostly smaller parishes in North Louisiana. Brown himself was forced from the insurance position in another scandal in 1992. In 1996, Wilson, still on the city council, ran unsuccessfully for the United States Senate. She finished with 31,877 votes. Victory went to Mary Landrieu of New Orleans, the narrow but disputed general election winner over the Republican Woody Jenkins of East Baton Rouge Parish, who had led a multi-candidate field in the primary. On April 22, 2006, Wilson was one of twenty-two candidates for mayor of New Orleans. In a nationally televised debate, Wilson said that New Orleans, post-Hurricane Katrina, should exclude the return of "pimps, welfare queens and drug dealers". Her critics called her "Peggy the Purging Princess." Pundits noted that her support in the heavily Democratic city was much weaker than had been expected, 772 votes. By contrast, a second Republican candidate, Rob Couhig, who had lost previous races for the United States House of Representatives, drew 10,312 votes ; from the primary, the incumbent C. Ray Nagin and then Lieutenant GovernorMitch Landrieu went into a runoff election, also called the general election. Nagin prevailed, 52-48 percent. After her service on the city council, Wilson was appointed by Republican Governor Murphy J. Foster, Jr., to the New Orleans Levee Board. Years later, in 2014, Nagin was convicted on twenty of twenty-one charges of wire fraud, bribery, and money laundering related to bribes from city contractors before and after Hurricane Katrina.
