In the latter part of 1856, he resigned the rectorship of his Memphis parish, and at the urgent request of Bishop Otey, accepted the rectorship of the Church of the Advent, Nashville. He had charge also of the Church of the Holy Trinity in that city, and extended his work to Edgefield, (now East Nashville), and to the parish of St Ann. He served the Diocese as a member of the Standing Committee, and as a clerical deputy to the General Convention meeting in Richmond, Virginia, in the Fall of 1859.
He was a man of varied and deep learning—a preacher of power and attractiveness, and ranked among the clergymen of greatest prominence and popularity in Nashville. He was of ardent temperament, affectionate disposition, and possessed personal magnetism to a remarkable degree, especially with young men, who looked up to him with an affection which is now rarely if ever shown by young men to the ministry. This, and the influence he had over young men, are illustrated by the organization in 1859 of the Rock City Guard, a militia company composed largely of the young men of Nashville. Dr. Quintard was at once elected Chaplain of that organization, and its first public parade was for the purpose of attending services in a body at the Church of the Advent at which he officiated.
His was a churchmanship of a type in those days considerably in advance of the average in the ante-bellum period in the South. He was clearly under the spell of the "Oxford Movement," and of the English "Tractarians," and occupied a position to which Churchmen generally in this country did not approach until ten or twenty years later. He was a "sacerdotalist,"—a pronounced "sacramentarian" at times when the highest "High" Churchmen of the country would have hesitated long before applying those terms to themselves.
To him baptism was, not "a theory and a notion," but "a gift and a power." And baptized children were to be educated, "not with a view to their becoming Christians, but because they were already Christians." Consequently he regarded Confirmation, not as "joining the Church," or as merely a ratifying and renewing of the vows and promises of Holy Baptism, and hence as something which man does for God;—but as something which God does for man,—the bestowal of the gifts of the Holy Spirit. To the preparation of candidates for Confirmation he therefore gave his most earnest attention, even to the extent of preparing "A Plain Tract on Confirmation," and (in 1861), "A Preparation for Confirmation," a manual of eighty-nine pages.
His veneration for the Church's liturgical inheritance was great, and the books of devotion he compiled and had printed for the use of soldiers during the war were drawn from the ancient sources. He attached the utmost importance to the Holy Communion as a means of spiritual life, and throughout the war he availed himself of every opportunity of administering it to the soldiers in camp, in the way-side churches as he passed them, and in towns where he temporarily rested with the army.
With a host of friends in Nashville and vicinity, who looked up to him with love and reverence, it is not strange that Doctor Quintard should have been the choice for chaplain of those who enlisted from that city for the defence of their homes and firesides in 1861. Many of the young men of his parish enlisted in the First Tennessee regiment, of which he was elected chaplain, and feeling as he did that these young men would need his spiritual care far more than those of his parishioners who were left behind, he felt it his duty to accept the office and go with his regiment to the seat of war. Both he and his parishioners supposed that his absence would not exceed six months. He did not return to Nashville until after the collapse of the Confederacy and the surrender of Lee's army in 1865.
During those four years he gathered up a rich fund of experiences, both grave and gay. Always an accomplished raconteur and brilliant conversationalist, it is but natural that a wide circle of friends in different parts of the world should have begged him to commit to writing the story of the war as he saw it and as none but he could tell it, and permit its publication. About the year 1896 he consented to do this and entered with considerable enthusiasm upon the literary task thus set for him.
It was quite characteristic of him, however, that the work as he projected it was likely to have been a laudation of the men with whom he was brought into contact during the civil strife, at the expense of the personal experiences of which his friends were more anxious to read. For Doctor Quintard was an enthusiast and an optimist. No man was ever more loyal to his friends than he. His estimate of human character was always based upon whatever good he could find in a man. Nothing was a greater delight to him in recalling the scenes of the war than to describe some deed of heroism, some noble trait of character, or some mark of friendship that was shown him by a soldier; to acknowledge some kindness shown him, or to correct some error of judgment that had been passed upon some actor in the drama of the civil war. Some of the men whom he paused to eulogize were those to whom fame had otherwise done but scant justice, and his estimate of them is in more than one instance an addition of worth to the history of the people of the Southern States.
The death of Doctor Quintard on the 15th of February, 1898, prevented the completion of the work he had begun more than two years previously; but left it in such form that it has not been entirely impossible to gratify the wishes of his friends in regard thereto, and to make a valuable contribution to the pictures of life in the Southern States during the troubled days of the Civil War.