Isabella Beecher was outraged like many of her Boston neighbors by the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law 1850. The new law, part of the Compromise of 1850, required citizens in free states to assist in the recovery of fugitive slaves under penalty of stiff fines or imprisonment. Isabella was fully occupied looking after her eleven children, but she knew someone who might be able to do something: her husband's sister, Harriet Beecher Stowe.