Nationalism represents, advances, and protects the interests of a national “people,” but the metaphor of bodily nativity at the core of claims to national unity proved increasingly implausible for a United States that, in the buildup to and the aftermath of the Civil War, proved to be more of a politically divided house than a corporeally singular nation. Efforts of mid-century writers like John W. Deforest and Walt Whitman to imagine a US nation-state as a heterosexual conjugal union between a single, feminized, national body and its governing state-as-husband would face challenges from later writers like William Dean Howells, who imagined increasingly intensive ways for racial difference within this single national body to undermine national unity figured as corporeal nativity. Responding at century’s end to such racial fractures in corporeal unity, W. E. B. Du Bois would displace the now-untenable conjugal union of the US nation-state with a double-consciousness located within the US citizen’s individual self. This hyphenated identity, grounded in a color line, installs the failed legacy of nineteenth-century US nationalism at the core of how twentieth- and twenty-first-century US citizens understand and describe their own and others’ imperial Americanness.