She believed that she had a responsibility to her fellow Virginians, particularly African Americans in her orbit. Van Lew chose to stay in Richmond during the war, even though she could have easily gone to relatives in the North. She embraced abolition after secession dashed her hope that the white South might reform itself. By the eve of the Civil War, she had concluded that slavery had made Southern whites anti-democratic, coercive, and arrogant.
Secession represented for Van Lew both a catastrophe and an epiphany. Van Lew secretly freed some of her slaves or allowed them to live as if free, but her family had de jure ownership of at least a half dozen people well into the Civil War.
They supported African colonization, the controversial movement to deport blacks to Liberia. At the same time, Van Lew and her mother privately lamented the evils of slavery and hoped that through individual acts of manumission they could contribute to the gradual erosion of slavery. The family lived in a mansion in Richmond's elegant Church Hill neighborhood, attended historic Saint John's Episcopal Church, and made every effort to assimilate fully into southern society, acquiring as many as twenty-one enslaved laborers by 1850. She attended a local academy before being sent to Philadelphia to complete her education. Her father was a prosperous hardware merchant until his death in 1843. Her middle initial possibly stood for Louise, like her mother.
Van Lew (15 October 1818–25 September 1900), espionage agent and postmaster of Richmond, was born in Richmond and was the daughter of John Van Lew, a native of Long Island, New York, and Eliza Louise Baker Van Lew, a native of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
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