2009 Presidential Years, Zinc

The 2009 Presidential Years cent in standard zinc composition completed the four-design bicentennial program honoring Abraham Lincoln's 200th birthday. Susan Gamble designed the reverse, sculpted by Joseph Menna, showing the United States Capitol with its dome still under construction. Lincoln served as the 16th President from 1861 until his assassination on April 14, 1865. His presidency encompassed the entire Civil War, the Emancipation Proclamation, the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery, and the beginning of Reconstruction.

The unfinished dome on the coin's reverse serves as a metaphor that operates on multiple levels. Literally, the Capitol dome was incomplete during most of Lincoln's presidency. Symbolically, it suggests the unfinished work Lincoln described in the Gettysburg Address: the task of ensuring that government of the people, by the people, for the people would not perish from the earth. The Philadelphia Mint struck approximately 284.4 million cents across all four 2009 bicentennial designs. After the bicentennial year, the Mint retired all four reverses and introduced a permanent new Shield design in 2010. The 2009 zinc cents remain readily available in uncirculated rolls, though finding high-grade examples from actual circulation grows more difficult each year as the coins show wear from daily use.