Pawtuxet-class cutter

Deck of Wayanda, ca. 1864. The shadowy image of beneath the sail, center right, is Abraham Lincoln. In the original, Lincoln’s face Is blurred by movement. His face was unnecessarily added at a later date. Sources: 1) Photograph is found on the page between pages 230 and 231 in Frederick W. Seward’s 1891 biography of his father entitled, “Seward at Washington as Senator and Secretary of State: A Memoir of His Life ...”. 2) Personal knowledge also contributes to the veracity of this comment. A copy of the photo was given to Captain J. W. White by Frank Pulsiver, Engineer in the USRC and the photographer and neighbor of Secretary Seward. It remains with one of the Captain’s descendants.

Commissioned in the closing months of the Civil War, few if any ships of the class had an opportunity for significant participation in the conflict. Kewanee and Wayanda are known to have done some convoy escort before the end of hostilities,[5] while Kewanee also did some cruising for privateers.[6] The only exchange of gunfire known to have involved any of the ships during the war occurred in November 1864, when a shore battery at Castine, Maine opened fire on Mahoning, but this was a case of mistaken identity.[7]

In the postwar period, the class settled into the normal peacetime duties of the Revenue Cutter Service. These included the prevention of smuggling; enforcing neutrality, quarantine, and other customs and navigation laws; protecting ships, shipwrecks and U.S. timber reserves; and in the words of one contemporary source, "saving the imperilled, feeding the hungry, and guiding the lost".[8] In the immediate postwar period, two ships of the class, Kankakee and Wayanda, were also engaged in extended transport missions, with Kankakee transporting customs agents to ports of the recently vanquished Confederacy to restore customs offices,[9] and Wayanda placed at the disposal of Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase for a two-month factfinding mission to the South. On the basis of his tour, Chase later recommended the extension of suffrage to Southern blacks, but his recommendations were ignored by the Johnson administration.[10]

In the late 1860s, two cutters of the class, Ashuelot and Mahoning, assisted in the thwarting of filibuster raids, the former in a planned 1866 raid on Canada by members of the Fenian Brotherhood,[11] and the latter in a later planned invasion of Cuba by a group of "ex officers and fanatics" known as the "Cuban Liberators".[12] In the same period, Wayanda and Kankakee were used for testing safety apparatus, mostly for the quick and effective launch of lifeboats.[13][14]

By 1867, after barely 2½ years of service from the class, the Revenue Cutter Service decided to divest itself of most of the Pawtuxets as their engines were deemed too complicated. Four of the vessels, Ashuelot, Kankakee, Kewanee and Pawtuxet, were consequently laid up in May 1867, and sold between June and August of the same year.[2] The first three of the above-named vessels all subsequently sailed to Japan, apparently in merchant service. Kewanee, renamed Musashi, became involved in the war between the Japanese Emperor Kōmei and the Tokugawa Shogunate, and exploded off Yokohama in 1869.[15] Ashuelot, as Takao, was destroyed the same year,[16] while Kankakee, renamed Kawachi, was broken up after 1868.[17] Pawtuxet, meanwhile, was sent to China and her later service history unknown.[17][18]

The two remaining cutters of the class, Wayanda and Mahoning, retained as the best of the Pawtuxets, both went on to make significant contributions with the Revenue Service. Wayanda was lengthened by 40 feet and sent via Cape Horn to the West Coast, where in 1868 she conducted an important survey of the coast of the newly acquired U.S. territory of Alaska. The recommendation of her captain, John W. White, to establish a federal reserve in the Pribilof Islands to protect both the Northern fur seals and the native Aleut people, was quickly acted upon by the U.S. government. His report on the misuse of alcohol as payment to the Aleuts by fur trading companies may also have influenced the government's decision to ban the importation of alcohol into the territory.[19] Wayanda was sold in 1873, renamed Los Angeles, and employed as a freight and passenger steamer on the West Coast for another 20 years, before being wrecked off Point Sur in 1894.[20]

The last ship of the class to operate as a revenue cutter, Mahoning, later named Levi Woodbury, went on to an extraordinary 51-year career with the Revenue Service.[21] Operating from various homeports in Maine, Levi Woodbury accumulated an outstanding record of aiding ships in distress in her regular winter patrols.[8][22] She also served briefly as USS Woodbury during the Spanish–American War.[23] After her final decommission in 1915, she too was sold into merchant service, disappearing from shipping registers in 1932.[17]