The majority of the Congressional Committee took the same view, declaring that "the riotous attack upon the convention with its terrible results of massacre and murder was not an accident. It was the determined purpose of the mayor of the city of New Orleans to break up this convention by armed force." The Congressional Committee did not make their investigation until the succeeding winter session of 1866-7. "We state one fact," said the committee, "significant both as bearing upon the question of preparation and as indicating the true and prevailing feeling of the people of New Orleans. Six months have passed since the convention assembled, when the massacre was perpetrated and more than two hundred men were slain and wounded. This was done by city officials and New-Orleans citizens, but not one of those men has been punished, arrested or even complained of. These officers of the law, living in the city and known to that community, acting under the eye of superiors, clothed with the uniform of office, and some of them known, as the proof shows, to the chief officer of police, have not only escaped punishment but have been continued in their places." Not only were the men who instigated and committed the terrible murders left unpunished, but, as the committee said, "the gentlemen who composed the convention have not, however, been permitted to escape. Prosecutions in the criminal court, under an old law passed in 1805, were at once commenced and are now pending against them for breach of the peace." Another authority declares that "the judge of the criminal court in New Orleans instructed the grand jury to find bills of indictment against the members of the convention and the spectators, charging them with murder; giving the principle of law and applying it in this case, that whoever is engaged in an unlawful proceeding from which death ensues to a human being, is guilty of murder, and alleging that as the convention had no right to meet and the police had killed many men on the day of its meeting, the survivors were, therefore, guilty of murder." The Congressional Committee did not hesitate to declare that "the facts tend strongly to prove that the criminal actors in the tragedy were the agents of more criminal employes, and demonstrate the general sympathy of the people in behalf of the men who did the wrong against those who suffered the wrong."