Napoleon was badly damaged during the Civil War and then finally abandoned after most of it had washed into the Mississippi River.

Bishop Joseph Rosati of St. Louis sent Father Peter Donnelly to establish a Catholic church in Arkansas where he purchased land and held the first mass there in May 1839.

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Peter Vivian Daniel wrote to his daughter about his visit to Napoleon in 1851 calling it a "miserable place [that] consists of a few slightly build wood houses, hastily erected no doubt under some scheme of speculations, and which are tumbling down without ever having been finished…" In 1852, Bolivar County established Wellington, Mississippi, as its county seat, nearly opposite Napoleon, on the east bank of the Mississippi River.

Other nearby townships were recorded as using Napoleon's post office and the Marine Hospital had become the primary fixture of the town.

Such levees were common work at other towns such as New Orleans and Baton Rouge but above the river at Napoleon an army report mentioned, "few or none had yet been attempted."

[4] Major Stephen Long of the U.S. Topographical Engineers was instructed to build the first hospital at Louisville, Kentucky.

Long noticed the flooding problems right away in Napoleon writing, "I cannot but regard the site selected for this hospital objectionable."

[5] The Weekly Arkansas Gazette of May 19, 1868, wrote: "We learn from Mr. Boyd, who has just returned from Napoleon, that the U. S. Marine Hospital at that place has about one half broken off and caved into the river."

In April 1861 secessionists set up two cannons at Napoleon with the intention of forcing riverboats to stop for inspection.

The economy was in ruins, slavery was coming to a sudden end, and river traffic was entirely Union controlled.

The Catholic church had its pews ripped apart and the only structure still standing was the Marine Hospital, which Federal forces did not use the for its intended purpose, instead sending patients elsewhere.

[6][7] During the American Civil War, Confederate soldiers would move east by foot from Napoleon, hide in a wooded area near the bend, and then fire on passing Union ships.

In just a single day the water had made a raging torrent cut into the earth and carried even large trees.

He opened up the new canal at full speed in the Conestonga, estimating the current to be at 12 knots and surprised transport ship that had seen them behind them the day prior.

He wrote the Secretary of the Navy, Gideon Welles on April 16, 1863, saying, "I have the honor to enclose a letter from Lieutenant-Commander Thomas O. Selfridge, which is interesting from the fact that it shows how easily cut-offs are made in the Mississippi when conducted with ordinary intelligence.

Lieutenant-Commander Selfridge saw the difficulty in defending the mouths of White and Arkansas rivers while kept so far apart by a useless neck of land and proposed to me to cut it.

I ordered him to do so, and he passed through with his vessel twenty- four hours after he cut the bend, this saving a distance of over 10 miles.

Local politics seemed to be natural for the Colonel and on November 1, 1820, he was the "Common Pleas Judge" for the township of Arkansas.

A traveler would remark that Frederick Notrebe had a few modern building adorning the banks of the River in 1832, a sign of prosperity.

With 71 slaves working the plantations, his prominence in the area was as G. W. Featherstonhaugh put it, "the great man of the place [Arkansas Post] is Monsieur Notrebe who is said to have accumulated a considerable fortune here."

The town was the subject of a chapter in Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi, in which he tells a story of learning from a deathbed confession that $10,000 was hidden behind a brick in a building in Napoleon.

[14][15] Twain reports that the early explorers De Soto, Marquette and Joliet, and La Salle visited "the site of the future town of Napoleon, Arkansas" in their pioneering journeys.