Doctor Quintard, Chaplain C.S.A. and Second Bishop of Tennessee: the Memoir and Civil War Diary of Charles Todd Quintard.

Doctor Quintard, Chaplain C.S.A. and Second Bishop of Tennessee: The Memoir and Civil War Diary of Charles Todd Quintard. Edited by Sam Davis Elliott. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003. Pp. xxii, 285. $39.95, ISBN 0-8071-2846-5.)

Before he died in 1898, Charles Todd Quintard, then the Episcopal bishop of Tennessee, began a memoir recounting his Civil War experiences. Those recollections were published, along with additional material, by Quintard's friend, Rev. Arthur Howard Noll, in 1905. Although Noll's compilation has long been out of print, historians have often mined the work, citing especially Quintard's impressions of John Bell Hood's ill-fated invasion of Tennessee in 1864. Quintard's anguish at losing so many compatriots at the Battle of Franklin provides a compelling human dimension to that tragic engagement.

Quintard labored unstintingly to maintain the University of the South in the years after the war, and it is fitting that a latter-day Sewanee graduate, Sam Davis Elliott, has provided a modern edition of Noll's work. Yet Elliott, a Chattanooga lawyer and author of a well-received biography of A. P. Stewart, has done more than that. He also won permission to publish a diary kept by Quintard that covers the period from October 15, 1864, through May 26, 1865. Although Quintard employed the diary in writing his memoirs, it naturally displays his reaction to events more viscerally than the latter work, written some thirty years after the war.

Elliott's annotated footnotes reflect his thorough research. A preface to the updated version of Noll's work and an introduction to the diary place both works in context and shed light on Quintard's remarkable life. A Connecticut native, Quintard became a physician before moving to Georgia in 1848. Removing three years later to Memphis, Quintard was encouraged to pursue a religious vocation by the Episcopal bishop of Tennessee. Quintard was ordained a priest and had charge of two Nashville parishes when the war erupted.

Members of the Rock City Guard, a Nashville military unit that entered Confederate service as part of the First Tennessee Infantry Regiment, implored Quintard to accompany them as chaplain. His decision to do so had far-reaching consequences. Since the regiment first went east before being sent to the western theater in 1862, Quintard met an astonishing number of high-ranking military and political figures of the Confederacy. During the war Quintard attended to the religious needs of his comrades, aided wounded soldiers as a surgeon after several battles, and presided over worship services at dozens of locales. He personally confirmed Braxton Bragg, lamented the death of fellow churchman Leonidas Polk, and consoled Hood in the aftermath of the Tennessee invasion.

Quintard was first and foremost a cleric. In one compelling irony, he recounts how a Union artillery officer at Perryville heard him speak after the war and subsequently became an Episcopal priest under his tutelage. A man of deep, abiding faith, compassionate and generous, Quintard garnered a host of friends throughout his life. Consecrated the second Episcopal bishop of Tennessee in October 1865, he threw his considerable energies into church tasks. The University of the South is a testament to Quintard's vision and labor Scholars of both American religion and the Civil War will profit by examining Elliott's well-crafted work.

CHRISTOPHER LOSSON

St. Joseph, Missouri