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During the Civil War Republicans contended that secret Democratic societies defied the government, undermining the Union war effort. The assertion of Democratic disloyalty lay at the core of Republican Party rhetoric during the war and remained a potent partisan strategy in the postwar decades. It held sway through the mid-twentieth century when historian Frank Klement took up the “Copperhead” cause. Klement's many books and articles presented them as civil libertarians frustrated and disadvantaged by their wartime role as opponents of the Lincoln administration. Klement dismissed the charges of Democratic Secret Societies as Republican propaganda. New work on the Copperheads by Jennifer Weber reasserts the Republican paradigm of Democratic treason and dismisses Klement as an apologist. This essay will use Pennsylvania as a test case to explore the reality of undeniable Democratic clubs. A minority of dissatisfied Democrats did organize, but at the grass-roots level. Their ad hoc associations mirrored the creation of Republican “loyal” societies with a spectrum of goals, from partisan unification to draft resistance. Military tribunals of test cases failed to vindicate Republican assertions of widespread Democratic treason. Thus the Republican paradigm falters when held to the light of evidence at the local level.

The introduction provides an overview of the phenomenon that was Ribbonism, teasing out its roots in the 1798 Rising and charting its progress from clandestine Catholic self-defence association to open political association. It does this within the framework of an assessment of the slippery meaning and varied historiography of Ribbonism and its associated organisations.

Chapter Five examines ‘Syndicate X’ (pseudonym), its historical origins, organization structure and operations. This syndicate is one of the largest groups specializing exclusively in non-trafficked transnational migrant women sex workers. The syndicate and its counterparts are anchors in KL’s migration-ancillary industry for sex work (e.g., ancillary partners such as money changers or hawala, and alliances with overseas syndicates). This chapter discusses why and how Syndicate X morphed from a hierarchical Chinese triad or secret society controlling on-street Malaysian women sex workers, to a more horizontal corporate-like enterprise specializing in up-market sexual services performed by transnational migrant women (especially those on the ‘Asian Circuit’ of sex work). Syndicate X brings in women of different nationalities and provides them with board and lodging, personal security and men clientele in exchange for monthly board and lodging fees and taxes on women’s incomes. Shaped by KL’s history of race relations, the racialisation of Syndicate X and migrant women also is examined in this chapter.

This reappraisal of the language and literature of Irish 'secret societies' questions the veracity of the blanket use of that term by contemporaries and modern historians. Ribbon societies are identified as the only true secret society, despite the tendency of Dublin Castle, the police, and their various agents and communicants to describe a variety of disorders as inspired or committed by clandestine societies. is is a significant and challenging viewpoint and one justified by a skilful and useful anatomization of the historiography to conclude that Ribbonism was a general community defence mechanism, but ‘an associational form that sought to distinguish itself from the rest of the community by its secrecy, its complex rituals and its quasi-masonic organizational model’ The chapter sees Ribbonism primarily as a show of collective economic interest.