Army Service
On 5 January 1859 Secretary of the Navy Isaac Toucey ordered the Commandant of the Mare Island Navy Yard to fit out Massachusetts prior to transfer to the War Department. She was turned over to the Army Quartermaster Corps in May 1859 and during the next few years cruised Puget Sound “for the protection of the inhabitants of that quarter”, which was going through rapid change and an influx of miners and settlers as a consequence of the Fraser Gold Rush and successive rushes just to the north in the Colony of British Columbia, and also as part of US military force assembled in the area during the period of confrontation with the Royal Navy and Royal Marines known as the Pig War, a bloodless though tense dispute over the boundary through the San Juan Islands. The Quartermaster General of the Army ordered Massachusetts re-transferred to the Navy 27 January 1862. Subsequently, she was placed in ordinary at Mare Island and surveyed.
Read more about this topic: USS Massachusetts (1845)
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