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Our understanding is completely different.
The Federal Constitution is a Compact amongst Sovereigns, "the people and their States". They form ( as you've said previously, ) the General Government to be "their agent". They delegate specific enumerated powers to "their agent". Visit Article 1 Section 8
As New York said:
...And that those Clauses in the said Constitution, which declare, that Congress shall not have or exercise certain Powers, do not imply that Congress is entitled to any Powers not given by the said Constitution..
Like any agreement, it must bind both or none at all. It can't bind the States, and then empower Fedzilla now can it? James Madison,when selling the Constitution to the State of New York definitely viewed it as a Compact:
Two questions of a very delicate nature present themselves on this occasion: 1. On what principle the Confederation, which stands in the solemn form of a compact among the States, can be superseded without the unanimous consent of the parties to it? 2. What relation is to subsist between the nine or more States ratifying the Constitution, and the remaining few who do not become parties to it?
"The first question is answered at once by recurring to the absolute necessity of the case; to the great principle of self-preservation; to the transcendent law of nature and of nature's God, which declares that the safety and happiness of society are the objects at which all political institutions aim, and to which all such institutions must be sacrificed. Perhaps, also, an answer may be found without searching beyond the principles of the compact itself. It has been heretofore noted among the defects of the Confederation, that in many of the States it had received no higher sanction than a mere legislative ratification. The principle of reciprocality seems to require that its obligation on the other States should be reduced to the same standard. A compact between independent sovereigns, founded on ordinary acts of legislative authority, can pretend to no higher validity than a league or treaty between the parties. It is an established doctrine on the subject of treaties, that all the articles are mutually conditions of each other; that a breach of any one article is a breach of the whole treaty; and that a breach, committed by either of the parties, absolves the others, and authorizes them, if they please, to pronounce the compact violated and void."
New York in turn ratified the Federal Constitution with the following:
That the Powers of Government may be reassumed by the People, whensoever it shall become necessary to their Happiness....
This amounts to nothing ? Need I remind you, " that's it's only a piece of paper"...The People are the States, and they speak as such.....
Mr. Madison's argument was mooted by the actual facts. The states ratified it unanimously, and the hypothetical never came into play. And, in ratifying it unanimously, the states also ratified the clause stating that the Constitution was the supreme law of the land, to which all state actions contrary to the Constitution and federal law, are explicitly voided....
Add to that the fact that all legislators and officers of the state government are required to provide an oath or affirmation to the effect that they will support and defend the Constitution. Among other things that means, to put it simply, that they cannot suddenly deny at their own convenience the clause of the Constitution that places the states in a subservient position to the Constitution and the Federal government it defines.
Honest people do not enter into binding agreements on the theory that it's only binding on those parties who feel themselves to be bound by them. In surrendering state sovereignty to the Constitution -- and make no mistake, that is EXACTLY what ratification meant -- the individual states entered into a binding contract that could not be abrogated by explicitly unconstitutional acts by the state governments.
States can, of course, try to secede by force; but to argue that they had the right to do so for free, is pure poppycock.
And of course, we cannot avoid the subtext here -- that if a state is going to go to war over its supposed sovereignty, it ought to have a good and moral reason for doing so. Protection of slavery is not a good reason.