Like, "Territories for Peace", Sort Of?

Barely a year into the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln suggested buying slaves for $400 apiece under a "gradual emancipation" plan that would bring peace at less cost than several months of hostilities.

The proposal was outlined in one of 72 letters penned by Lincoln that ended up in the University of Rochester's archives. The correspondence was digitally scanned and posted online along with easier-to-read transcriptions.

In a letter to Illinois Sen. James A. McDougall dated March 14, 1862, Lincoln laid out the estimated cost to the nation's coffers of his "emancipation with compensation" proposal.

Paying slave-holders $400 for each of the 1,798 slaves in Delaware listed in the 1860Census, he wrote, would come to $719,200 at a time when the war was soaking up $2 million a day.

Buying the freedom of an estimated 432,622 slaves in Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, Missouri and Washington, D.C., would cost $173,048,800 — nearly equal to the estimated $174 million needed to wage war for 87 days, he added.

Lincoln suggested that each of the states, in return for payment, might set something like a 20-year deadline for abolishing slavery.

The payout "would not be half as onerous as would be an equal sum, raised now, for the indefinite prosecution of the war," he told McDougall.

The idea never took root.