They passed laws placing restrictions upon the President. Allen Guelzo of Princeton University has the answer.

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Script:

It was April 1865.

The Radicals' first step was to refuse to seat any Senator or Representative from the old Confederacy. This video quickly covers his background, rise to the presidency, and little-discussed facts about the Commander in Chief.

Transcription:

   Born in Raleigh, North Carolina, and raised in poverty. He pardoned all who would take an oath of allegiance, but required leaders and men of wealth to obtain special Presidential pardons.

A few months later Congress submitted to the states the Fourteenth Amendment, which specified that no state should "deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law."

All the former Confederate States except Tennessee refused to ratify the amendment; further, there were two bloody race riots in the South.

Congress was divided over how the Union should be reunited: when and how the secessionist South should regain full status, whether former Confederates should be punished, and when and whether black men should be given the vote.

Devastated by war and resorting to violence, many white Southerners hoped to restore a pre-Civil War society, if without slavery, and the pugnacious Andrew Johnson seemed to share their goals.

When Johnson allegedly violated one of these, the Tenure of Office Act, by dismissing Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, the House voted eleven articles of impeachment against him. His vision of reconciliation abandoned the millions of former slaves (for whom he felt undisguised contempt) and antagonized congressional leaders, who tried to limit his powers and eventually impeached him.

The climax of Johnson’s presidency was his trial in the Senate and his acquittal by a single vote, which Gordon-Reed recounts with drama and palpable tension.

Johnson, seemingly more progressive than Lincoln, looked like the ideal person to lead the country.

In 1834, he was elected mayor of Greeneville. He died a few months later.

Born in Raleigh, North Carolina, in 1808, Johnson grew up in poverty. He opened a tailor shop in Greeneville, Tennessee, married Eliza McCardle, and participated in debates at the local academy.

Radical Republicans in Congress moved vigorously to change Johnson's program. He eventually settled in Greeneville, Tennessee, where he set up his own tailor’s shop and prospered.

“I will not give up this Government,” he thundered in December 1860. “No; I intend to stand by it, and I entreat every man throughout the nation who is a patriot…to come forward, that the Constitution shall be saved, and the Union preserved.”

After Union military forces occupied large parts of Tennessee in 1862, Lincoln tagged Johnson as the state’s provisional military governor.

Entering politics, he became an adept stump speaker, championing the common man and vilifying the plantation aristocracy. He did.

As a Member of the House of Representatives and the Senate in the 1840's and '50's, he advocated a homestead bill to provide a free farm for the poor man. Johnson meanwhile kept his eye on Douglass, eventually making a surprising effort to appoint him to a key position in his administration.

Levine grippingly portrays the conflicts that brought Douglass and the wider Black community to reject Johnson and call for a guilty verdict in his impeachment trial.

In a dramatic and pivotal meeting between Johnson and a Black delegation at the White House, the president and Douglass came to verbal blows over the course of Reconstruction.

As he lectured across the country, Douglass continued to attack Johnson’s policies, while raising questions about the Radical Republicans’ hesitancy to grant African Americans the vote.

The Radical Republicans won an overwhelming victory in Congressional elections that fall.