One hundred and fifty years ago this month, Robert E. Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia surrendered to Union troops at Appomattox, Va., and Joseph E. Johnston and the remnants of the Armies of Southern Virginia and Tennessee and other forces surrendered in Durham, N.C. The two surrenders didn’t end the U.S. Civil War, but they broke the back of the Confederate military.

The butcher’s bill for the war was steep. Estimates of the number of troops killed in combat range from 205,000 to 250,000, while some 400,000 to 500,000 died outside of combat, mainly from disease.[1] Nearly a half-million more returned home wounded.[2] Those numbers equal almost 4 percent of the entire U.S. population in 1860.

The economic costs of the Civil War were also steep. Union and Confederate governments spent a combined $2.9 billion in 1860 dollars on soldier pay and materiel,[3] the equivalent of $75.3 billion today.[4] The Confederacy also expropriated some $330 million ($8.6 billion today) in supplies. The war’s destruction of cities, factories, railroads and cropland (almost entirely in the South) represented a loss of about $1.5 billion in 1860 dollars—$39 billion today. Then there were the indirect costs of the war: the lost productivity of the dead and wounded, the lost output of the destroyed farms and factories, and the general disruption of human life both during and for decades after the war. Estimates of the indirect cost range from $6.75 billion to $13.5 billion in 1860 dollars,[5] which would be $175 billion to $350 billion today.

The enormous cost in blood and treasure raises the question, was the Civil War avoidable? Arguments over the war’s motivations are interminable, but there is little disagreement that slavery was the central, if not sole, issue. So to ask if the war was avoidable is to ask if the North and South could have ended slavery peacefully.

Elsewhere in the Western Hemisphere—and in some northern U.S. states—peaceful emancipation was achieved, in part, by compensating slaveholders for the loss of what they considered their lawful property. In the decades after the American Revolution, Pennsylvania, New York and New Jersey (and arguably Massachusetts) required slaveholders to free their slaves—but only after the slaves had labored enough years that their production offset their value at birth as slaves. Elsewhere, compensation was more direct: In 1834, the United Kingdom voted to pay West Indies slaveholders an amount equal to $2.8 billion today in exchange for emancipation. In 1854, the Venezuelan government purchased the freedom of that nation’s slaves. Cuba and Brazil did likewise later in the century.[6]

How much would the United States have had to pay to buy its slaves out of slavery? Economic historian Claudia Goldin has estimated that the market value of all American slaves in 1860 was $2.7 billion in that year’s dollars. That was an enormous and seemingly unaffordable sum for a nation whose federal budget was only about $78 million that year and whose gross domestic product was just $4.2 billion.[7] But then, the Union governments spent $2.3 billion on direct war costs, and the North suffered about $5.6 billion in indirect costs as well as some 350,000 dead and 275,000 wounded.[8] Compare the North’s nearly $8 billion monetary cost and the immense human cost of the war to the $2.7 billion cost of purchasing all slaves from slavery; from a simple utilitarian perspective, there’s little doubt which option was better.

So why did the Civil War happen? Perhaps few Northerners or Southerners thought a war was possible until the battles actually began. Or perhaps they thought the war would end quickly and at low cost, with their side as victor. (Once the war began and its cost became clear, both President Abraham Lincoln and the Congress seriously considered compensated emancipation for the remaining slave-holding Union states.[9]) On the other hand, perhaps Northerners and Southerners didn’t consider compensated emancipation because they had other motives for war.

The more interesting question is whether, morally, the United States should have tried compensated emancipation. The notion of paying slaveholders for freeing their fellow man is troubling, to say the least. But then, 600,000–750,000 dead, a half-million wounded, and costs of $300 billion to $475 billion in today’s dollars could have been avoided. In addition, perhaps the nation would not have suffered the social unrest of the Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction eras that birthed the Ku Klux Klan and Jim Crow.

I offer no clear answer for whether the United States should have simply paid to end slavery. But contemplating that question is fitting on the 150^th anniversary of the end of the Civil War.