On this day 250 years ago at his headquarters at Richmond Hill estate located on Manhattan Island then just north of the City of New York (but today at the corner of Varick and Vandam streets in the Manhattan borough of New York City), General Washington issued General Orders to his troops to dispel a rumor and encourage the men for the coming battle:

The General being informed, to his great surprize, that a report prevails and is industriously spread far and wide that Lord Howe has made propositions of peace, calculated by designing persons more probably to lull us into a fatal security; his duty obliges him to declare that no such offer has been made by Lord Howe, but on the contrary, from the best intelligence he can procure—the Army may expect an attack as soon as the wind and tide shall prove favourable: He hopes therefore, every man’s mind and arms, will be prepared for action, and when called to it, shew our enemies, and the whole world, that Freemen contending on their own land, are superior to any mercenaries on earth.

Washington’s General Orders also informed the troops that

General Sullivan is to take the command upon Long Island, ’till General Greene’s State of health will permit him to resume it, and Brigadier Lord Stirling is to take charge of General Sullivans division ’till he returns to it again.

Major General Nathanael Greene, along with one quarter of the Continental Army was out due to illness raging through the Army, primarily typhoid fever, and would not be able to fight when the British attacked a week later. Greene had prepared the defenses on Long Island and his replacement by Maj. Gen. John Sullivan, who was not familiar with the terrain and Greene’s plans, would have a profound detrimental effect on the outcome of the battle.

The General Orders also announced that

The General Court Martial to set on Thursday, as a Court of enquiry, into the conduct of Adjutant Brice of Col. Smallwood’s Battalion, charged with “disobedience of orders and disrespectful behaviour to his commanding officer.”

The records of the court martial of Adjutant Jacob Brice were lost or never recorded, but he was apparently acquitted. Brice would continue to serve honorably until the end of the War, including with a narrow escape at the coming Battle of Brooklyn, a wound and capture at Charleston, and ending with the rank of captain in the 1st Maryland Regiment.

Sources: “General Orders, 20 August 1776,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/03-06-02-0079. [Original source: The Papers of George Washington, Revolutionary War Series, vol. 6, 13 August 1776 – 20 October 1776, ed. Philander D. Chase and Frank E. Grizzard, Jr. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994, pp. 87–90.]; Schecter at 121

On this day 250 years ago in Philadelphia, Pierre Eugene du Simitiere, a Swiss emigrant artist retained by the committee of Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and Benjamin Franklin to design a seal for the United States, submitted to the Continental Congress his proposed design. The Congress would not adopt du Simitiere’s proposed seal, but elements of the design, including the motto “E Pluribus Unum” and the Eye of Providence on the crest, would be part seal of the United States adopted by Congress six years later and that we still use today.

Sources: “III. DuSimitière’s Proposal, 20 August 1776,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-01-02-0206-0003. [Original source: The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 1, 1760–1776, ed. Julian P. Boyd. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950, pp. 495–496.]; https://www.monticello.org/encyclopedia/seal-united-states