Here's a MTP transcript excerpt I found:
MR. RUSSERT: I was intrigued by your comments about Abe Lincoln. "According to Paul, Abe Lincoln should never have gone to war; there were better ways of getting rid of slavery."What about this do you find "ignorant," except perhaps that he seems to concede that the War Between the States was fought to eliminate slavery?REP. PAUL: Absolutely. Six hundred thousand Americans died in a senseless civil war. No, he shouldn't have gone, gone to war. He did this just to enhance and get rid of the original intent of the republic. I mean, it was the--that iron, iron fist..
MR. RUSSERT: We'd still have slavery.
REP. PAUL: Oh, come on, Tim. Slavery was phased out in every other country of the world. And the way I'm advising that it should have been done is do like the British empire did. You, you buy the slaves and release them. How much would that cost compared to killing 600,000 Americans and where it lingered for 100 years? I mean, the hatred and all that existed. So every other major country in the world got rid of slavery without a civil war. I mean, that doesn't sound too radical to me. That sounds like a pretty reasonable approach.
ML/NJ
So Ron Paul was saying the Federal government should have just bought all of the slaves. What if the people did not want to sell their slaves Mr. Paul, what then? He makes it sound so easy. Besides, the Emancipation proclamation was not done (abolishing slavery) until 1863 when the southern states were already in rebellion. Before the Civil War Lincoln never talked about abolishing slavery, merely not extending slavery to new states and territories.
There were 4M slaves in the USA in 1860. Prices varied wildly, but $750 to $1000 is quite conservative as an average.
That would mean $3,000,000,000 to $4,000,000,000. At a time when the entire federal budget for 1860 was $60,000,000.
IOW, buying the slaves would have required federal taxation to expand by orders of magnitude, causing the very expansion of the federal government that preventing the war would have supposedly allowed.
This ahistorical notion that buying the slavers out would have been infinitely cheaper is shown to be utter nonsense by the reaction of Union slaveowners to offers of compensated gradual emancipation. Lincoln tried repeatedly throughout the war to get Union slaveowners to agree to such a program. They rejected it every time, even towards the end of the war when it would seem even an idiiot would realize slavery was on its way out and the smart thing would be to grab what money was available.
Slavery was utterly tied in to the southern way of life, as is made clear by their violent reaction when they thought it was threatened. Financial considerations were not necessarily the most important in their eyes.
Here's an attempt to quantify the cost of the war versus the cost of buying the slaves and freeing them. I don't agree with all his premises, but I thought it was interesting.
http://www.gongol.com/research/economics/slavebuyout/