Smithland held strategic importance during the Civil War because it sat at the confluence of the Cumberland and Ohio rivers, where river pilots were taken aboard for upriver travel to Clarksville and Nashville and where an important river trade commercial center had developed. The rivers were critical to Union strategy in the west for penetrating Confederate defenses and reestablishing Federal control. After Polk's move to occupy Columbus ended Kentucky's neutrality in September 1861, General U.S. Grant quickly occupied key points along the Ohio River, including Smithland, which Federal troops under General C.F. Smith occupied on September 7, 1861. Fortifications were built to protect the river junction, and Smithland also became a recruiting post, especially for African American troops after 1864, a training camp for troops heading south, and a major handling point for food and supplies through extensive Quartermaster Corps and Commissary Corps facilities. It remained an important Federal base throughout the war, with heavy steamboat traffic, dozens of boats often tied at the wharf, and large numbers of troops passing through the western theatre. Union General Lew Wallace arrived on January 25, 1862, called it a "beautiful little place, mostly Secesh but inclined to be quiet," and later wrote Ben Hur after the war; unconfirmed accounts suggest he began the book while there. Although most residents of Smithland and Livingston County supported the Confederacy and served in its army, there were few incidents and no deliberate destruction of property, but the long Federal occupation was difficult and sometimes harsh, with soldiers foraging in gardens, taking feed, mules, horses, and slaves for labor at the fort, and using houses, churches, and public buildings as stables, ruining some of them. The Federal navy also used Smithland as headquarters for the gunboat division on the Ohio and Cumberland rivers, stored coal there, buried sailors who died on the western rivers there, and used Cumberland island as pasture for livestock when shipments to troops in the field were delayed.