Well the Taney court had ruled personal liberty laws unconstitutional in 1842, I have no doubt that they would have found the later ones unconstitutional as well. State's rights was not apparently a universally respected concept.
Lemuel Shaw was Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Court.
Benjamin R. Curtis was a former Associate Justice of the US Supreme Court. He resigned from the Supreme Court in protest of its Dred Scott decision.
Joel Parker was professor of constitutional law at Harvard and former Chief Justice of the New Hampshire Supreme Court.
free dixie,sw
If you feel that Northern states were simply exercising their state sovereignty by ignoring Article IV Section 2 of the Constitution, then you shouldn't be surprised that other sovereign states said to hell with this, if you're not keeping the Constitutional bargain you made, we're leaving.
That is what the Philadelphia Public Ledger article I posted warned about.
FYI, Massachusetts' personal liberty laws included the following:
Any person who shall act as counsel or attorney for any claimant of any alleged fugitive from service or labor, under or by virtue of the acts of congress mentioned in the ninth section of this act, shall be deemed to have resigned any commission from the Commonwealth that he may possess, and he shall be thereafter incapacitated from appearing as counsel or attorney in the courts of this Commonwealth...
It is no wonder that many Massachusetts attorneys and judges thought the law was unconstitutional.