Of the remaining two cutters, Wayanda went to the West Coast, where she conducted an important survey of the Alaskan coastline before being sold in 1873, when she became the merchant steamer Los Angeles.

Mahoning, meanwhile, renamed Levi Woodbury, went on to a remarkable 51-year career with the Cutter Service, accumulating an outstanding record for aiding ships in distress from her homeports in Maine, and also serving in the Spanish–American War, before being sold in 1915.

In common with the usual government practice during the war, construction contracts for the Pawtuxets were distributed through several states, with three of them built in New York, two in Baltimore, Maryland, and one in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

The engine drove a single 8-foot diameter, 12-foot pitch screw propeller geared upward at a ratio of 3:1, delivering a speed of about 12 knots.

[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.

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.

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.

[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.

[21] Operating from various homeports in Maine, Levi Woodbury accumulated an outstanding record of aiding ships in distress in her regular winter patrols.