GBH Daily: Camp up-in-the-air

☀️Sunny day with highs in the 80s. Sunset is at 7:29 p.m.

A judge yesterday heard arguments about the fate of Camp Monotomy, a former Girl Scout camp on Lake Winnipesauke in New Hampshire.. A rundown of our previous coverage: A trust established 65 years ago outlined that the land should be used as a camp for Girl Scouts from Arlington and that, if they can no longer operate a camp there, they can sell it but must first give an opportunity to a buyer who wants to keep it operating as a camp. But now trustees want to sell it for $18 million to a developer who plans to build luxury housing on the property.

Another camp owner who wants to buy the camp for $1.5 million says the sale would violate the terms of the trust. Associate Justice Carla Salvucci did not immediately issue a ruling. You can read more of Marilyn Schairer’s reporting on this story here.

Four Things to Know

1. Police believe they’ve found the body of Karen Solomon, a woman suspected of killing her husband, Worcester Police Officer Kurt Solomon. Employees at Fairlawn Rehabilitation Hospital in Worcester found a body near the hospital Monday and called police, who had been looking for Karen Solomon for almost a week.

“We believe this case is a tragic murder-suicide that occurred,” Worcester Police Chief Paul Saucier said. Investigators found a handgun near her, which was not a Worcester Police Department-issued weapon. They will continue looking into what happened.

2. With just over two months until the Nov. 3 midterm elections, U.S. Supreme Court justices yesterday said states that sued the Trump administration over an executive order trying to limit mail-in voting did not have standing to take the case to court. The justices, in an unsigned order, did not say whether they’d find the order itself constitutional.

“The Constitution is clear: states have the primary authority to administer elections,” Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell said in a statement. “This decision does not give the Trump Administration the ability to interfere with our elections, it just requires further legal action by Massachusetts and our coalition states.” Early voting for the Sept. 1 primary has already begun.

3. Boston Symphony Orchestra musicians voted Sunday night to authorize a strike as they approached the end of their union contract. Union members and management agreed to a 48-hour contract extension and are still negotiating. The authorization vote doesn’t necessarily mean the musicians will go on strike. It simply gives union leadership the option to call one.

“Our focus remains on the negotiations and the ongoing constructive conversations,” BSO CEO Chad Smith said. “We are committed to reaching an agreement with competitive pay and benefits that enhances collaboration with the Players.”

4. Even if you love that dirty water, please avoid touching the water in the Charles River downstream from the Massachusetts Avenue bridge. The Boston Public Health Commission has confirmed that the river has an overgrowth of cyanobacteria, commonly known as blue-green algae.

“The algae in the water can release what’s called a cyanotoxin, which can be harmful. It can cause gastrointestinal upset, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, all those unpleasant health symptoms, which can be very serious, particularly for small children and pets,” said Paul Shoemaker, director of the Environmental and Occupational Health Division at the Boston Public Health Commission.

Before it was known as ‘Old Ironsides,’ it sailed to buoy the Haitian Revolution

Here’s a piece of USS Constitution history you may not have heard, even if you’ve visited the ship at the Charlestown Navy Yard in Boston: in 1799, it took part in the United States’ first diplomatic mission to a Black-led republic.

The land we now know as Haiti was called Saint-Domingue, a French colony. And Toussaint Louverture had just led the Haitian Revolution to overthrow French colonial powers. This, GBH’s Adam Reilly reports, remains the only successful uprising of enslaved people to overthrow a colonial power and establish a nation.

The nascent United States, under President George Washington, had sent $700,000 to France to help — after all, France had just supported the American revolutionaries. But when Quincy native John Adams became president, he took a different approach.

“The change between the Adams Administration [and] the Washington Administration in terms of the Haitian Revolution could not have been starker,” Ronald Angelo Johnson, a historian at Baylor University, told Reilly. “He and his secretary of state, Timothy Pickering, also from Massachusetts, are going to lay out a foreign policy that is going to treat the government of Toussaint Louverture as if Toussaint Louverture, a formerly enslaved Black man, was a head of state. They are going to treat him almost as an equal administration.”

Adams sent a squadron of ships to the island, led by the USS Constitution under Captain Silas Talbot.

“Silas Talbot makes an incredible statement for 1799: ‘I am willing to serve under Toussaint Louverture.’ Well, how many white Americans at that level would say, ‘I’m going to serve under a Black man who has been enslaved before?’” Johnson told Reilly.

So why did U.S. policy change? Louverture had wanted to resume trade with the United States, and had sent a white man who lived in Saint-Domingue to the U.S. as his envoy. The United States was also in the midst of a naval conflict with France known as the Quasi-War. And when Adams left office the diplomatic relations didn’t last. The U.S. didn’t recognize Haiti’s independence until 1862.

Reilly has the story in more detail here. 

Dig deeper: 

-Abigail Adams implored her husband to ‘remember the ladies.’ Here’s what she meant.

-A grim footnote illuminates a harsh reality for Black Bostonians during the American Revolution

-Pushing a ‘sacred rebellion,’ American colonists justified revolt with religion