It looks like the Civil War cost around 11.5 Billion dollars in order to free 3.9 million people for a cost of about $2,950 per person (not counting the cost of humans dying.)

An average slave in 1809 went for about $300 while land in NC in 1860 was about $6 an acre…

It would have been massively cheaper and involved far less suffering to just buy all of the slaves free and give them each 40 acres and a mule in NC instead of fighting a war.

But people would rather spend a bunch of money getting men on their own side killed in battle than give in to “those bastards on the other side.”