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Instead of a war, people who didn't want slavery should have ponied up and bought their freedom. In an act of covetousness to take the property of others, they became property themselves.

Not practical under the economics of the times. I have a good history of Texas that cites a close estimate of the hypothetical value of Texas slave holdings in 1860. It was $160,000,000 -- more than the sum of all other improved property in the State. It was just an insane number, and that was just Texas and their (primarily) sugar cane hands.

Compared to the $11.6 billion dollar cost of the war?

In dollars and cents, the U.S. government estimated Jan. 1863 that the war was costing $2.5 million daily. A final official estimate in 1879 totaled $6,190,000,000. The Confederacy spent perhaps $2,099,808,707. By 1906 another $3.3 billion already had been spent by the U.S. government on Northerners' pensions and other veterans' benefits for former Federal soldiers. Southern states and private philanthropy provided benefits to the Confederate veterans. The amount spent on benefits eventually well exceeded the war's original cost. - Source "Not practical" eh? Then there was the cost of making corporations 14th Amendment citizens, which looks to be the complete loss of Constitutional federalism as subsumed to a fascist global superstate to enslave us all. I'd say buying the slaves would have been cheap by comparison.