Paying the owners worked for England when they freed their slaves and when Russia freed the serfs.
Of course they didn’t kill hundreds of thousands in a war. But Americans did because too many thought it was immoral to pay a slave owner for his property.
Then you would justify that it was the owners right to consider another human 'his property'. It worked for England only so much as it shifted the slave trade more to other countries. We had already been fighting the moral battle for years to no avail.