Charles Quintard was an Episcopal priest who, in spite of his pro-Union stance, volunteered to be a chaplain in the Confederate army in the American Civil War. A sympathetic, warm, intellectual man loved by soldier and civilian alike, he volunteered because he felt that the soldiers from his local area needed him more than his local parish. Within four months of the end of the war, he was elected bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Tennessee, an election ratified by the Episcopal Church's General Convention in October. That election is considered a major step in the healing of the divisions in that church and indeed in the larger civil society. Bishop Quintard wrote this memoir in 1896, thirty-one years after the end of the war.