He introduced and signed into law a bill to establish the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York.20 The new school soon would illuminate one path toward nonclassical higher education in America, with a curriculum that, by the 1820s, featured civil and military engineering, mathematics, French, chemistry, and geography.21 Henry Adams, a great-grandson of John Adams, would write in one of his histories that “the West Point engineers doubled the capacity of the little American army for resistance, and introduced a new and scientific character into American life.”
