What problems did Harriet Beecher Stowe encounter?

Harriet Beecher Stowe faced at least two problems as she confronted social issues in her time.
The first led her to write her groundbreaking Uncle Tom's Cabin. Stowe was an abolitionist who ended up living in Cincinnati, Ohio, just across the Ohio River from the slave state of Kentucky. She knew slave-owning families and thus was intimately aware of the moral problems with slavery. However, like many white people of her time, she went on with her life, assuming that slavery would inevitably die on the vine as a cruel and outmoded institution. However, when the Fugitive Slave Act was passed in 1850, Stowe was shocked and angered. This act criminalized anyone in a free state providing help to an escaping slave and required Northern officials to return any black person suspected of being a runaway slave to the South. Ordinary citizens could face imprisonment and a fine of $1,000 (approximately $30,000 when adjusted for inflation) for merely helping a slave survive.
Once this act passed, Stowe lost her faith that the political system would abolish slavery. Distressed, she wrote her novel as a way to try to depict the realities of being enslaved.
After the book was published and became a bestseller, Stowe faced the problem of pushback from Southerners who accused her of lying and exaggerating about slavery in her novel. In response, Stowe published A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin, which provided factual information and slave narrative to back up her claims. This, too, became a best-selling book.