I have not explored that issue, but I suspect that it would have been similar to what many of the northern states had done when they eliminated slavery --- a Grandfather arrangement where current slaves remained "property" for life but children of those slaves would either be born free or entitled to freedom at age 21.
That is just a guess. I'll have to do some research to find more information. Virginia, to their credit, would have taken a much larger economic hit than say New York or New Jersey who were both late in ending slavery in the North, but the record shows that there was a near majority in Virginia for doing so in the Jacksonian era.
Sadly, a “missed opportunity” that could have changed the course of history.
Yes, I think it would have been nearly impossible without an enormous emission of debt. In his discussion of the issue apropos Texas's social and economic development in the antebellum period, T. R. Fehrenbach, my manual source, gives the economics of emancipation thusly:
"Aside from the emotional questions of right or wrong, or subordination and equality, emancipation by 1860 had become economically unreasonable. In Texas, the assessed value of all slaves was $106,688,920 -- 20 percent more than the assessed value of all cultivated lands. Whatever its moral capital, the South had invested its economic capital in blacks. Like many another capitalist or dominant group before and since, the Southern gentry, in coping with a labor problem, had fallen into a terrible cultural and racial trap. It was more vulnerable to criticism than either the Northern industrialist paying out slave wages or a government using forced labor, because the cotton planter was creating no fruits for the descendants of his workers to enjoy. [This is a huge, overlooked point about slavery.] The great mass of Negroes were never expected to rise out of bondage. And the profits of the plantation economy were rapidly creating a new leisure class that, however admirable in many respects, was already an anachronism in the 19th-century Western world.
He goes on to compare the planters to the old 18th-century squirearchs of the Atlantic seaboard, who in the North were shoved aside by the Millocracy but who continued to lead society and its affairs in the South.
The arithmetic is such that it would have taken a national undertaking and debt issue to redeem the slaves, and would have taken generations to work off. But even at that, as Fehrenbach points out, the slaves would have come out of bondage in many cases with only the shirts on their backs and nowhere to go. Even the abolitionists didn't have a clue what to do afterward, and Lincoln, in his letters, professed his own shortage of answers in the 1850's.