On this day 250 years ago in New York the Continental Army was bracing for an imminent attack that turned out not be imminent. General Washington issued Orders to the entire Army:

The movements of the Enemy indicating a speedy Attack, the officers of the several Regiments, of all Ranks, are to be very attentive to the state of the Arms and Ammunition of their respective regiments, and to be particularly alert in Case of Alarm.1

. . .

Ammunition Boxes in each regiment, not having Ammunition in them, are to be collected that they may be filled—Commanding Officers of Regiments will send them to their respective Brigadier’s Quarters immediately.

All the Troops are every Morning to be under Arms a little before break of day—and continue ’till sun-rise, when they may be dismissed—As the preservation of our Country may depend very much on a strict obedience to this Order, it is hoped that commanding Officers of Brigades & Regiments will pay a special attention to it

At the end of the day, Sgt. James McMichael of Col. Samuel Miles’s Pennsylvania rifle regiment recorded in his diary that “we received intelligence at midnight, that the enemy were advancing. We all paraded immediately and man’d the lines. The alarm proved false and at daybreak we returned to our encampment.”

There was no combat around New York or anywhere else in the
United States on this day 250 years as far as I can find, and the British would wait another 12 days before attacking Washington’s Army in New York, but that does not mean that Americans were not giving their lives for their country on this day 250 years ago. The Continental Army soldiers manning the lines on Manhattan were falling sick every day, and many would not recover. And hundreds of Continental Army soldiers and militia were languishing in the Old North Dutch Church and the Van Cortlandt and Livingston sugar warehouses that had been turned into makeshift prisons, starving with 3/4 rations (when and if they were fed) and suffering from abuse bordering on torture. More soldiers died from illness in the War than from combat, and over half of the American soldiers captured in New York in 1776 would be dead by the end of the year. Americans died for their country 250 years ago today; I just have not found where their names were recorded for history.

Sources: “General Orders, 30 September 1776,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/03-06-02-0333. [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. 432–433.]; https://nycrevolutionarytrail.org/library/prison