Here's some more accurate data for you.
There was always a great difference between the values of individual slaves. When the average price of negroes ranged about $500, prime field hands brought, say, $1,000, and skilled artisans still more. At that rate, an infant would be valued at about $100, a boy of twelve years and a man of fifty at about $500 each, and a prime wench for field work at $800 or $900.
--Author: Phillips, Ulrich B.
Title: The Economic Cost of Slaveholding in the Cotton Belt.
During the early English Colonial Period, 1640-1700, the price for a healthy male African slave about the equilivent of $100.00, with female slaves costing slightly less. From 1800-1860, healthy young male slaves brought up to $1500 and females brought up to $1000 dollars. Around $700 is probably the average cost.
--Copyright (c) 1994 "Emancipation Stations", by Henry Robert Burke
Alright, so:
Cost of Compensated Emancipation
$500-$700 average monetary price * 4 million slaves = $2.0 to $2.8 Billion dollars
Actual Cost of the War of Federal Aggression
$6 Billion dollars (This reflects Union expenditures only)
600,000 dead
Wrecked Southern infrastructure; damaged Northern infrastructure.
Yeah, that War was a real bargain, by comparison.
It doesn't matter even if the numbers were inflated. the U.S. government of 1860 still did not have that kind of cash, and it would have been politically impossible for it to buy the freedom of some 4 million slaves.
The expenses born by the Civil War were born by both the federal government and the states, North and South, and by 1865, the Union did have the capacity raise a lot of cash through Lincoln's emergency income taxes.
But nothing of the sort existed in 1860, including the necessary infrastructure for actually managing 4 million suddenly freed and displaced slaves. If you were a northern taxpayer in 1860, would you want your taxes dramatically hiked just so that the federal government could pay off the southern planters and free the slaves, who would immediately cause wages to drop and present strong competition for jobs?
So, this whole counterfactual argument is really silly.