On 12 March 1842 JS and the other general officers of the gathered at his home in , Illinois, for a general court-martial that further organized and regulated the legion. JS, the commanding officer of the legion, presided over the meeting as “President” of the court. The general court-martial—which constituted the organization’s legislative body—passed at least six resolutions, dividing the city into militia districts aligned with the city’s wards, reorganizing some of the militia’s unit structures, and requiring that all laws the court-martial passed be published. The court also passed the lengthy “Ordinance No. 1”—consisting of several sections—which described in detail the legion’s organizational structure and outlined the service requirements of the legion’s members. This ordinance augmented the “Ordinance Organizing the ‘Nauvoo Legion,’” which the city council had passed in February 1841. The most significant organizational change introduced with this new ordinance was the expansion of the staffs of the legion’s various generals. , the legion’s major general, served as the “Secretary” for at least some of the resolutions and may have kept minutes for the 12 March court generally.

The minutes of the court-martial are in the handwriting of , who was appointed in October 1843 to collect and record Nauvoo Legion proceedings. Stout likely produced the record sometime after this appointment, copying from an earlier version of this document. A note dated 8 December 1843 in Stout’s handwriting on the page of the minute book preceding these minutes indicates that most of the minutes subsequent to the legion’s meetings of March 1841 and prior to this 12 March 1842 meeting were lost. When Bennett was cashiered from the legion and left in summer 1842, he apparently took these minutes with him.

Two additional versions of some of the resolutions featured in these minutes are extant, also in ’s handwriting. The first contains the first four resolutions featured below; the second includes only the final resolution. Either or both of those versions possibly predate the copy in the organization’s minute book and may have served as its basis. Stout included a note at the end of the text presented here stating that this copy of the minutes was incomplete, suggesting that the court-martial conducted at least some additional business on this date. The final resolution copied by Stout in the minutes ordered that all laws the court-martial passed be printed, resulting in the publication of the lengthy “Ordinance No. 1” in the next issue of the Times and Seasons, the newspaper published in .