"As for packing up and leaving, I believe that folks in NC had to have some sort of passport or decree to leave"
Cump,
I don't think that passport thing applied to just NC. I remember reading in John Beaucamp Jones book Diary of a War Clerk, I think that is the proper title, been a while since I read it. Anyway, he says that he is being driven crazy by all the as he called them,"Jews" wanting passports to go north. Some might have been Jewish but most of them were monied people who saw the hand writing on the wall and were trying to leave the south with their money before it was to late. Many of them were the same agitators who riled up the population in Charleston before seccesion.
FC