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.
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.