Toussaint climbed into the pulpit of the church of Port-au-Prince and for an hour overwhelmed the formerly free with outrages.

The rupture between Toussaint and Rigaud was precipitated by the maneuvers of the priests, the émigrés and the English, whose hatred against the latter was the more ardent in that he forbade the first, with more rigor than ever, their simonies, the second their return to their hearths, and the others the monopoly of the immense commerce of the South. Toussaint burst forth at last: on 3 ventôse at three o’clock in the afternoon (21 February), the call to arms, the sound of which is always mournful, but is far more so when, instead of announcing the presence of the foreign enemy, it announces the approach of civil crises, came to freeze with terror the residents of Port-au-Prince. The commune is summoned to the church; everyone hastens to go there, above all the citizens of 4 April, Black and of color, for the police, going through the houses, enjoined it on them more especially. Toussaint dismounts quickly from his horse and climbs into the pulpit, holding in his hand some papers which he crumples. He has not yet said a word, and already his angry air imprints terror on minds. At last, from the height of that very pulpit where so lately he had proclaimed an amnesty in favor of the enemies of the Republic, of the enslavers, he overwhelms the {{formerly free|*anciens libres*: those who were free before the general emancipation}} for an hour with the most violent outrages; he reproaches them above all with the deportation of the Swiss, as if the Swiss were not composed as much of men of color as of Blacks; he accuses them of being enemies of the liberty of the Blacks. He ends by announcing his departure for the North, uttering these words as grotesque as they are horrible: “I see to the depths of your souls; you were ready to rise against me; but although all the troops are about to leave the West, I leave there my eye and my arm; my eye, which will know how to watch you, my arm, which will know how to reach you” (1).