Frank Leslie was an established success in New York publishing circles when he entered the satire field in January 1859 with his Frank Leslie's Budget of Fun. Like his Illustrated Newspaper (founded in December 1855), the Budget of Fun was a sixteen-page well-illustrated folio, initially selling for six cents a copy. All indications suggest that the Budget of Fun immediately dominated the field (which in 1859 included Yankee Notions, Nick-Nax for All Creation, Phunny Phellow, the New York Picayune, and the Comic Monthly). Later it was outpaced only by the brilliant weekly, Vanity Fair, which started up in December 1859.

Unlike many of its satirical contemporaries, Frank Leslie's Budget of Fun didn't shy from politics; it relished it. The magazine, like its publisher, was sympathetic to the Democratic Party and suspicious of Lincoln and the Republican Party agenda. During the 1860 campaign, it liked to remind its readers that the abolitionists made up a sizeable portion of the Republican Party and, even though Lincoln wasn't one, it tarred him with that powerful brush. But, after the votes were counted, and later still when the South seceded, Frank Leslie's Budget of Fun waved the Union flag with the best of them.

That didn't make it a lap-dog of the administration, however. The Budget of Fun still regarded the abolitionists with disfavor. As for the fate of slavery, it seemed to take perverse pleasure in Lincoln's anguish over the issue and then greeted his Emancipation Proclamation with skepticism, wondering just how Lincoln was going to enforce it. It was critical at times of the bickering between administration officials and the ineffectual nature of the Union Army leadership, Lincoln included. But after Gettysburg, the Budget of Fun was increasingly supportive of Lincoln, giving no aid to the faction anxious to deny Lincoln's renomination and emphatically rejecting McClellan's candidacy.

In 1865, it celebrated Lincoln's second inauguration with a joyously comic cartoon, proclaiming him, "The Tallest Ruler on the Globe." Frank Leslie appropriately left the mourning of Lincoln's death to his Illustrated Newspaper. The Budget of Fun was silent on the tragedy, but it had earned the right to grieve the nation's loss.

By Richard S. West