Doctor Quintard, Chaplain C.S.A. And Second Bishop Of Tennessee Being His Story Of The War (1861-1865)

What does it mean to serve a cause you cannot fully embrace? Charles Todd Quintard, an Episcopal priest of deep pro-Union convictions, faced this unbearable tension when he volunteered as a chaplain for the Confederate army. He did not fight for secession. He fought for the soldiers from his Tennessee parish who needed him. This memoir, written thirty-one years after the war's end, preserves one of the Civil War's most human and complicated voices. Quintard served among men whose cause he could not endorse, tending to their souls while the nation tore itself apart. His account renders the daily brutality of camp life, the camaraderie and loss, and the strange mercy of ministry in a land divided against itself. He writes not of glory but of the ordinary saints and sinners he encountered - the soldiers who prayed, who doubted, who died. Four months after Appomattox, Quintard was elected bishop of Tennessee, a reconciliation that helped heal the fractured Episcopal Church and pointed toward a harder healing in the broader nation.