I don't know if you're still working on this, but this seems similar behavior to my Nokia ip530. I needed to enable "device polling" in the advanced setup (while the HDD was still in the host machine used to load pfSense). Otherwise, ifconfig would show two NICs as active, but would not have an IP or be pingable and the other 2 NICs wouldn't come up at all. YMMV.
edit: these were Intel 21143 NICs.