"Ah," replied the General, "has the Doctor returned? Where does he officiate? I shall be glad to attend his services."
Later I was called upon to visit the General's wife in sickness and I found myself very busily engaged in visiting the sick and wounded of the Federal forces at Nashville and in burying their dead. For weeks I was in constant attendance in the hospitals and in camp. Gradually I began to realize that I had been unconsciously converted from a Confederate to a Federal Chaplain. When I decided to take my family to New York, I was waited upon by a committee of Federal officers, the chairman of which made a touching address and asked me to accept a purse of gold in token of the high appreciation in which my services had been held by the Federal officers in Nashville. I need hardly say that I was both surprised and gratified.
In those days the railways were in charge of military conductors, the coaches were greatly crowded and it was difficult to obtain seats. But General Parkhurst came to my assistance, sent his adjutant to the railway station to secure seats for me and my family, and placed a guard over them. Thus my family made a very comfortable journey.
On reaching New York, I was most cordially received by my friend the Rev. Dr. Morgan, Rector of St. Thomas' Church, and was invited to preach for him the following Sunday. His was therefore the first church in the North in which I preached or held service of any kind after the war.
I returned to Tennessee on the 1st of September, 1865, and on the 6th of that month, a special convention of the Diocese met in pursuance of the call of the Standing Committee, to elect a Bishop to succeed Bishop Otey, who had died in April, 1863. The convention met in Christ Church, Nashville. On the second day, the convention proceeded to the election. And in the afternoon of that day, the President of the Convention, the Rev. Dr. Pise, announced that the clergy, by an almost unanimous vote, had nominated me for that high office.
The laity retired to consider the nomination and soon returned and reported that they had ratified the same. The President thereupon announced that I had been duly elected Bishop of the Diocese of Tennessee. With my consecration in St. Luke's Church, Philadelphia, in the presence of the General Convention of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America, on Wednesday, the 11th of October, 1865, I felt that the war between the states was indeed over.
CHAPTER XV
A LONG EPISCOPATE
The consecration of Dr. Quintard to the Episcopate of Tennessee was of peculiar significance in the history of the Church in the United States. The consecration took place at the first meeting of the General Convention after the close of the war. At that convention all doubts as to the mutual relations of the Northern and Southern Dioceses were dispelled. The latter had never been dropped from the roll of the General Convention, notwithstanding the fact that pending the war they had been forced by the exigencies of the case, to withdraw from the Northern Dioceses and organize the "Protestant Episcopal Church in the Confederate States of America." They were still regarded as constituent members of the American National Church. Each day of the convention meeting in 1862, the Southern Dioceses had been called in their proper turn, beginning with Alabama; and though absent, their right to be present was never questioned. Still the question must have arisen in the minds of many of the Southern Churchmen as to how far this feeling might extend among the Church people of the North.
With the General Convention meeting in Philadelphia in October came the opportunity for the Church and the Church people of the North to express clearly their feelings towards their Southern brethren; and this they did, first, by the cordial welcome extended to the two southern Bishops present, and to the clerical and lay deputies in attendance from three Southern Dioceses; secondly, by the ratification of the consecration of the Rt. Rev. Dr. Wilmer to the Episcopate of Alabama, which had taken place in 1862, at the hands of Southern Bishops acting wholly independently of the Church in the North; and thirdly, by the almost unanimous vote upon the report made to the House of Deputies on the Consecration of the Bishop-elect of Tennessee, wholly ignoring the especially conspicuous official position he had held in the Confederate army and the prominent part he had taken in the affairs of the Church in the Confederate States. His consecration, therefore, furnished a very significant act by which to crown the work of reunion of the Northern and Southern Dioceses.
The service of Consecration was, in dignity of ritual, quite in advance of the times. Dr. Quintard prepared himself therefor, by a vigil held in the Church of St. James-the-Less. The Consecrator was the Rt. Rev. Dr. Hopkins, Bishop of Vermont and Presiding Bishop of the Church in the United States. Five other Bishops of Northern Dioceses united in the act of Consecration, as did also the Rt. Rev. Francis Fulford, D.D., Bishop of Montreal and Metropolitan of Canada, whose presence "contributed to a growing sense of the unity of the Church throughout the whole American continent."