Well, most other European countries that had slavery did end up repaying slave owners for the economic loss of their slaves. However, one of the reasons that the United States avoided that was because they saw how much trouble it gave the British when they did it. Phasing former slaves into the free population is never easy, and the British struggled greatly to do so. They went through a series of plans that mostly ended in failure, sometimes violently.

Furthermore, the slave owners had to be willing to part with their slaves at the government's insistence. Personally, I highly doubt that Southerners were at the point where they would have accepted such a plan. Slavery was a huge part of their very culture, in addition to its economic benefits. Some Southerners even left the nation entirely and went to Latin American areas where slavery was still legal after the Civil War. The fact that the South seceded, not when an emancipation plan was in the works, but when they smelled the merest hint of it, i.e. that Lincoln was an abolitionist, suggests that there was no way they would have accepted some form of peaceful emancipation. You have to remember that Lincoln made no steps to emancipate slaves prior to the Civil War. In fact, his speeches all suggest to me that he wouldn't have done anything at all, besides say publicly that slavery was morally wrong, though what he might or might not have done is subject to debate, of course.

For some more reading you can check out Rebecca Schloss' Sweet Liberty for the British strategies of emancipation and Sharon Strom's Confederates in the Tropics which talks about exactly that.

This question would be more suitable for /r/HistoricalWhatIf. We focus on history as it was, not history as it might have been.