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.
You missed the point. Dred Scott was not about personal liberty laws. Dred Scott was not a fugitive. The problem was that many northern states prohibited their residents from owning slaves. Dred Scott’s owner, a resident of Missouri at the time he bought Dred Scott, became a resident of Illinois on two occasions. Dred Scott’s point was that when his putative owner was residing in Illinois, he should have been freed. The Supreme Court disagreed, holding that Dred Scott remained property even while his owner resided in Illinois, which made it possible for anyone from a free state to go south and buy a slave and bring that slave back as a slave. That legalized slavery nationwide regardless of the state’s law regarding holding slaves. See - nothing to do with personal liberty laws regarding returning fugitives to owners living in the South.
The fugitive slave law took the issue out of state courts and out from under state personal liberty laws into federal court. But it also compelled northern citizens to serve as deputies in the apprehension of slaves. And the Dred Scott decision also overturned laws in several states that allowed free Blacks to be citizens declaring that no Blacks could be citizens in any state regardless of status. That went far beyond enforcing Article IV.
You are right about the order of events.