Why would confederate soldiers tombstones be facing the west rather than the east?

Question

We visited an old cemetery the other day and noticed that a section of confederate soldier tombstones were facing in the opposite direction of all the others. Does anyone know the reason for this?

Answer 1

Was the cemetery in a northern state? If so, perhaps it was a matter of northerners wanting to differentiate between north and south in such a way that would be insulting. If that is so, it's an awful thing to do.

Answer 2

where was this cemetery

Answer 3

Separating the dead from the North and South was a common practice that lasted for a generation after wards,  The North spend much time and money after the war gathering up dead Union soldiers and re-interring them in the first new national military cemeteries.

The military cemetery at Arlington, Va was confiscated from the Lee family, and Washington heirs, when the land had been farmed until the War began. There is a separate section of the cemetery reserved for Confederate graves. Southerners often favored tombstones with a point on top, rather than the usual curved top surface, so that Yankees would not be able to sit on their graves.

Not until after 1898, Spanish-American War, did the Federal government acknowledge Confederate dead and provide some assistance to maintaining their cemeteries. It had been left to the southern states to care for their own dead. There after a unified muster list of all dead was prepared.

There was on both sides of the conflict, during and after wards, much hard feeling toward the enemy dead. The dead were often left where they fell, unburied, and unknown, or else dumped into temporary, sometimes mass graves without even a shroud for the body. Desecration of graves and cemeteries was not an unknown practice in the South, where most fighting had occurred, and where most were buried on both sides.

Answer 4

You must have been in a union state because this would show that the soldiers were from the confederate