After the war, Longstreet and his family settled in New Orleans, a location popular with a number of former Confederate generals. He entered into a cotton brokerage partnership there and also became the president of the newly created and prominent insurance company. He actively sought the presidency of the Mobile and Ohio Railroad but was unsuccessful, and also failed in an attempt to get investors for a proposed railroad from New Orleans around the northwestern coast of the Gulf of Mexico south across the Rio Grande river and American-Mexican border to Monterrey, Mexico. In 1870, he was named president of the newly organized New Orleans and Northeastern Railroad. With Grant's support, he applied for a pardon from President Andrew Johnson. Johnson refused, however, telling Longstreet in a meeting: "There are three persons of the South who can never receive amnesty: Mr. Davis, General Lee, and yourself. You have given the Union cause too much trouble." Regardless of such opposition, the Radical Republican-controlled United States Congress restored his citizenship rights in June 1868.