By this Constitution, certain duties were imposed upon the several States, and the exercise of certain of their powers was restrained, which necessarily implied their continued existence as sovereign States. But to remove all doubt, an amendment was added, which declared that the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States, respectively, or to the people. On the 23d May , 1788, South Carolina, by a Convention of her People, passed an Ordinance assenting to this Constitution, and afterwards altered her own Constitution, to conform herself to the obligations she had undertaken.
Thus was established, by compact between the States, a Government with definite objects and powers, limited to the express words of the grant. This limitation left the whole remaining mass of power subject to the clause reserving it to the States or to the people, and rendered unnecessary any specification of reserved rights.
We hold that the Government thus established is subject to the two great principles asserted in the Declaration of Independence; and we hold further, that the mode of its formation subjects it to a third fundamental principle, namely: the law of compact. We maintain that in every compact between two or more parties, the obligation is mutual; that the failure of one of the contracting parties to perform a material part of the agreement, entirely releases the obligation of the other; and that where no arbiter is provided, each party is remitted to his own judgment to determine the fact of failure, with all its consequences.
In the present case, that fact is established with certainty. We assert that fourteen of the States have deliberately refused, for years past, to fulfill their constitutional obligations, and we refer to their own Statutes for the proof.
I'm going to go waaaay out on a limb here and guess that what South Carolina was talking about was the Fugitive Slave laws. If I am correct in this then the charge is bogus and without merit. It is true that when the first fugitive slave acts were passed in the 1840's 1850 northern states enacted what wered Personal Liberty Laws to thwart it. They figured that by requiring jury trials, writs of habeas corpus, rights to legal representation, extradition requests and so forth the legal process could be used to keep the runaway slaves from being returned. The Supreme Court, not surprisingly, ruled in Prigg v Pennsylvania that such laws had to be enforced by the federal authorities but that state and local authorities could not be forced to act in fugitive slave cases. With the passage of the 1850 act, the states again responded with a round of personal liberty laws which were being challenged but per the earlier Supreme Court decision while the states could not hinder federal authorities in retrieving runaway slaves they did not have to assist.
So South Carolina's beef is that the norhern states were following Supreme Court guidelines.