Even we insane people are right sometimes.
Nicolay and Hay, Lincoln’s personal secretaries and no friends of the South, in Volume 3 of their book Abraham Lincoln, A History noted that a December 11, 1860, "careful analysis and review of all Northern personal liberty bills" by the National Intelligencer found that the personal liberty laws of Vermont, Massachusetts, Michigan and Wisconsin were unconstitutional. Nicolay and Hay also say the National Intelligencer "certainly could not be accused of a desire to misrepresent either the North or the South." [Source: Nicolay and Hay]
From that National Intelligencer article as quoted by Nicolai and Hay:
"But all laws interfering with the exercise of the powers conferred by Congress under the fugitive-slave law of 1850, as is the case with the laws of Vermont, Massachusetts, Michigan, and Wisconsin are unconstitutional, and, as such, are null and void."
I found the following in researching the personal liberty laws of the period:
The Vermont and Massachusetts laws made it illegal for a citizen to execute or help execute the fugitive slave act or to arrest a fugitive slave under penalty of one year in jail or $1,000 fine. In Massachusetts it was illegal to assist someone in arresting a fugitive slave.
The fugitive slave act was judged constitutional by the US Supreme Court. In other words, in Vermont and Massachusetts you could be imprisoned for assisting in the execution of a constitutional US law or the arrest of a fugitive slave. Slaves brought into Vermont were also declared to be free.
Massachusetts law made it more expensive than a slave was worth to have the slave returned. Wisconsin forbad the enforcement of a judgment for violation of the constitutional fugitive slave act. The Michigan legislature declared that their law "was designed to and if faithfully executed will prevent the delivering up of fugitive slaves" [from the Detroit Free Press quoted in the March 2, 1861, issue of the State Gazette of Austin, Texas].
Look at the above restrictions in light of the earlier Prigg v Pennsylvania ruling of the US Supreme Court. Did the restrictions above discharge the slave from service or labor or interrupt, limit, delay, or postpone the right of the owner of the slave to the immediate possession of the slave, and the immediate command of his service and labor? If so, then those state personal liberty laws violated the Constitution.
Violation of the Constitution by a state is not one of the "states rights." States rights refers to those powers and rights not given to the federal government, prohibited the states, or specified in the Constitution. The right of a state to pass laws that violate a clause in the Constitution agreed to by all states (Article IV, Section 2) is not a "states right."
I trust that the Associate Justice of the US Supreme Court who resigned the Court over the Dred Scott decision, the Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Court, and the professor of constitutional law at Harvard who was the former Chief Justice of the New Hampshire Supreme Court had pretty good insight into whether the Massachusetts law was unconstitutional. If you can show that they were wrong, please do so. Similarly, if you can show that the analysts of the National Intelligencer quoted by Lincoln's secretaries were wrong, I’d be interested.
I have said on these threads that I think the problem of escaped slaves would probably get worse for the South if they successfully seceded. Slaves could then escape to a separate slave-free Northern country right across the border that would probably do away with the fugitive slave law. The return of escaped slaves in that case would probably have had to be negotiated by treaty. Some reports indicate that some 10,000 slaves, mostly from states next to the Mason-Dixon line, escaped in the decade before the WBTS. Less than a thousand (from my possibly faulty memory) were returned.
If you are going to seriously argue that it was, and rightly should have been "constitutional" to hold slaves in the South, but "unconstitutional" to free runaway slaves in the North, and that the Supreme Court's Dred Scott decision was a good one, then I'd suggest you don't belong on Free Republic.
Go post your lunacies where they belong: on Aryan Nation, or some Neo-Nazi site.
The correct answer here is that slavery had to be defeated, period, and that the South's refusal to accept this in any form was the cause and motivation for the Civil War.