Samuel Adams was born in Boston on September 16, 1722. He entered the Massachusetts House of Representatives in 1765. He became a member of the Continental Congress in 1774, signed the Declaration of Independence, and was an architect of the Articles of Confederation. He helped draft Massachusetts’s 1780 Constitution. Upon retiring from Congress in 1782, he served as a state senator until becoming Massachusetts lieutenant governor in 1789. He attended the 1788 Massachusetts convention that ratified the proposed U.S. Constitution. Adams became governor upon the death of John Hancock in 1793 and was elected governor in his own right in 1794. He served as governor until 1797, when he retired from public life. He died in Boston on October 2, 1803.