[BroJoeK]

DiogenesLamp: "The political and economic ties over time would start to look like this, which is it's natural affinity."

Your problem is US political ties could never look like this so long as the Confederacy remained the world's last best hope for slavery.
Also your "let them go in peace" scenario, where the Confederacy somehow consumes 1/3 more of the Union without war assumes, in effect, a President Buchanan type victor in 1860, but then there would be no need for secession.

Possible map of slave-power victory in Civil War:

[x]

DiogenesLamp: "The political and economic ties over time would start to look like this, which is it's natural affinity."

What natural affinity? What ties Idaho to Alabama or Utah to South Carolina or Iowa and Arkansas? Those states were on opposite sides of America's political divides from much of the country's history. I guess this is just more of Diogenes's monomania. It's hard to argue with people like that because everything they say just reflects the one idea that has taken possession of them.