The great unremembered Truth about State’s Rights is NOT that southern state’s were objecting to the federal government trying to free the slaves, because that was not happening.
The TRUTH is that the Civil War was directly caused by the violation of the NORTHERN STATES’ RIGHT - NOT to have slavery in their territories when the Supreme Court nullified northern laws against slavery with the Dred Scot decision and then the Democrat-dominated Congress’s passage of the Fugitive Slave Act forced northern states to enforce southern property rights over escaped slaves by returning them. These blatant violations of NORTHERN STATE SOVEREIGNTIES so enflamed the North that many people began taking the direct action of going to southern plantations and taking the slaves north to Canada in the Underground Railroad. The Northern Republicans were united by these laws to throw out the norhern Democrats and elect an anti-slavery President. In the documents proclaiming secession, the southern states did not complain that the federal government was violating their rights, only that the Democrat-controlled federal government was unable to stop the stealing of their slaves, the killing of slave owners and the burning of plantations by bands of northern abolitionist which had exploded after Dred Scot, and the likelihood that it would be much worse under Lincoln.
An analogous situation today would have been if the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision had prompted an ongoing nationwide wave of destruction of abortion clinics and deaths and injuries of abortionists. Since it did not, abortion remains legal and the Roe decision, like Dred Scot, a continuing violation of state’s rights. They don’t want you to know that the meaning of state’s rights at the time of the Civil War was the EXACT OPPOSITE of the propaganda then and what is taught now because you might get the wrong idea and take matters into your own hands on current issues like the people of the Underground Railroad did. As long as you only talk, blog and complain, you can safely be ignored.
States Rights refers to powers retained by the states under the 10th Amendment to the Constitution. These retained powers do not include powers delegated to the central government, assigned elsewhere in the Constitution, or prohibited to the states.
The Constitution required of all states that "No Person held to Service or Labour in one State, under the Laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in Consequence of any Law or Regulation therein, be discharged from such Service or Labour, but shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due." [Article IV, Section 2, Clause 3 of the Constitution.] Northern states agreed to to this clause when they ratified the Constitution. This part of the Constitution was the basis of the federal fugitive slave laws. Northern state laws that violated the Constitution with regard to the return of fugitive slaves were not valid laws at the time and cannot be legitimately claimed as States Rights.
By the way, your timing appears mixed up. The two Fugitive Slave Laws were passed into law years before the Dred Scott decision, not afterward. Both laws were ruled constitutional by the Supreme Court.
Lincoln's two secretaries, Nicolay and Hay, in Volume 3 of their book Abraham Lincoln, A History noted that a careful 1860 study of the personal liberty laws by the National Intelligencer found that the personal liberty laws of Vermont, Massachusetts, Michigan and Wisconsin were clearly unconstitutional.
About the same time, three distinguished jurists in Massachusetts led a host of other lawyers in declaring that the Massachusetts laws were unconstitutional and saying that these laws could lead to secession (which they did). The three were the Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Court, a former member of the US Supreme Court who had resigned in protest of the Dred Scott decision, and a Harvard constitutional law professor who had been Chief Justice of the New Hampshire Supreme Court.
Once states started seceding, a number of Northern states started amending and repealing their personal liberty laws, but it was too late to stop secession.