Charles Todd Quintard was an American Episcopal physician and Episcopal bishop of Tennessee. He also was the first Vice-Chancellor of the University of the S.
Background
Charles Todd Quintard was born on December 22, 1824, in Stamford, Fairfield County, Connecticut, United States. He was the son of Isaac and Clarissa Hoyt Shaw Quintard and the brother of George William Quintard. He was a descendant of Isaac Quintard who was born in Bristol, England and died in Stamford in 1738.
Education
Quintard went to Trinity School in New York City, studied medicine with Dr. James R. Wood and Dr. Valentine Mott, and in 1847 received the degree of Doctor of Medicine from University Medical College (now New York University). After a year at Bellevue Hospital, he settled in Athens, Georgia and began practice. The University of Cambridge conferred on him the degree of LL. D. in 1868.
In 1851 Charles Quintard became a professor of physiology and pathological anatomy in the Memphis Medical College and also one of the editors of the Memphis Medical Recorder. A devoted member of the Episcopal Church, he came into close personal relations with Bishop James H. Otey and in 1854 began to study for the ministry. In 1855 he was ordered deacon, and in 1856 he was ordained priest and soon became rector of Calvary Church at Memphis. A little later he went to the Church of the Advent in Nashville.
At the outbreak of the Civil War, he was a chaplain of a Nashville military company that joined the 16th Tennessee Regiment, of which he was elected chaplain. He served the Confederacy as a chaplain, as a surgeon, and, for a brief period, as an aide to General W. W. Loring. His first service was under Lee in western Virginia. He was with Bragg's army during the invasion of Kentucky. He was present at the battles of Cheat Mountain, Munfordville, Perryville, Murfreesboro, Chickamauga, and Franklin. His unfinished reminiscences of the war were later published by Noll. In 1865 he was elected bishop of Tennessee and was consecrated at Philadelphia during the General Convention that accomplished the reunion of the Northern and Southern branches of the Episcopal Church. For thirty-three years thereafter he performed miracles of labor, in what was virtually a missionary field. An adherent of the Oxford movement, he was never an extremist, and increasingly he endeared himself not only to his own flock but to the whole state. He became well known in the North and in England, which he visited frequently, attending every Pan-Anglican Conference from 1867 to 1897.
One of the first Americans to preach in the royal chapel at Windsor, he was made a chaplain of the order of the Knights of Saint John of Jerusalem and in 1888 assisted at the installation of the Prince of Wales as grand prior. During the whole of his bishopric, he was vitally interested in education, which he believed a fundamental function of the Church as well as an urgent need of Southern youth. He aided in the establishment of a number of preparatory schools, but his most important work in aid of the cause was his second founding of the University of the South at Sewanee, the dream of Leonidas Polk and James H. Otey that had been close to fulfillment at the outbreak of the war. The war had swept away its endowments and blasted all hope of new ones, and the ten thousand acres granted by the state of Tennessee in 1858 would lapse in 1868 unless the institution was then in operation.
In March 1866 Quintard climbed the mountain, selected locations for the buildings, and planted a cross on the site. He brought about a meeting of the trustees and obtained the modest funds with which temporary buildings were erected. Elected vice-chancellor, he went to England, obtained generous aid there, and in 1868 opened the institution to students with a small but able faculty. In 1872 he retired from the direct oversight of the institution, but his labors for it ceased only with his death.
As bishop, Charles was instrumental in the revival of the Protestant Episcopal Church in Tennessee and extended its ministry to blacks.
Quintard believed that his mission was to make the Episcopal Church in Tennessee "a refuge for all - the lame, halt and blind as well as the rich." He opposed parish pew rents and fostered a ministry on behalf of the disadvantaged. Concerned by the effects of industrialization on workers, he established a refuge for the poor in Memphis in 1869, and in 1873 he advocated a plan to assist people lacking food, housing, and education.
Personality
Charles Todd Quintard was a unique personality. He was a man of deep and wide learning, a man's man of intense human feeling and sympathy, a powerful and eloquent preacher. His French inheritance was marked in manner and gesture, in sprightly and ready wit, and in the mental process. Highly gifted socially, full of anecdote, of original ideas, and of elemental intellectual force, he was, however, above all things a spiritual leader and, in the better sense of the term, an inspired evangelist.
Quotes from others about the person
"Quick in movement, in apprehension, in sympathy; affectionate, generous; a skilled physician and surgeon, as well as a devout and ardent Christian Priest, he made for himself a place in the hearts and minds of the soldiers of the Army of Tennessee, and by a natural, and all but necessary, transition became their Bishop when he could no longer be their chaplain." - J. B. Cheshire.
Interests
Education
Connections
In 1848 Charles married Eliza Catherine Hand. The couple had four children.