The Unarmed Witness: 30 Accounts of Civil War Behind the Lines gathers a compelling polyphony of civilian, medical, journalistic, and literary testimony from the American Civil War. Diaries, memoirs, letters, reportage, and retrospective narratives illuminate the war's domestic theatres: hospitals, occupied towns, refugee routes, households, prisons, and makeshift relief networks. Moving between Union and Confederate settings, the volume foregrounds the often-overlooked labor of care, endurance, observation, and survival, while preserving vivid accounts of battlefield aftermath, political uncertainty, and social fracture. Its contributors include celebrated writers, nurses, soldiers, foreign observers, freedpeople, and women whose private records became essential historical documents. Their varied positions reveal how gender, race, class, region, and allegiance shaped wartime experience. Together, these voices belong to the rich tradition of Civil War life writing, challenging conventional military histories by locating conflict within intimate spaces and everyday moral choices. The collection also demonstrates how recollection and testimony helped construct competing memories of the nation's defining crisis. Recommended for students, scholars, and general readers alike, this volume offers an unusually broad encounter with the Civil War beyond the front lines. Its juxtaposed perspectives invite careful comparison, deepen historical empathy, and foster a productive dialogue between literary form and lived experience.