• How the myth that accuses Thomas Jefferson of fathering the children of Sally Hemings began with allegations made by a scurrilous scandalmonger as part of an unsuccessful blackmail scheme to force President Jefferson to appoint him to a government job.
  
  
• How the results of a 1998 DNA study were presented in such a way as to mislead the public into believing that scientific tests had proved Thomas Jefferson was the father of Sally Hemings' last child.
  
  
• How information about other Jefferson males living in the vicinity of Monticello who could have been the father of Sally Hemings' last child was kept from the news media and even omitted from scholarly books.
  
  
• How the news media were provided with the falacious title of a scientific study, and how some were misled into denigrating Thomas Jefferson as a liar, a hypocrite, and a fraud based on that false and misleading information.
  
  
• How the descendants of Tom Woodson continue to maintain he was the son of Thomas Jefferson even though the DNA tests conclusively disproved this long-repeated family story.
  
  
• Why exhuming the body of Thomas Jefferson and subjecting it to DNA testing cannot prove whether or not someone living today is or is not a descendant of his.
  
  
• How a research committee ignored all the contrary evidence and suppressed a dissenting minority report in order to arrive at the conclusion that Thomas Jefferson was probably the father of all Sally Hemings' children.
  
  
• Why a deceptive statistical study indicating a high probability of Jefferson's guilt is based on inadequate evidence and is invalid.
  
  
• Why, from a legal viewpoint, the case against Thomas Jefferson is deficient in any substantial evidence and completely without merit.
  
  
• How a key letter written by Jefferson's granddaughter was altered by one author to reverse its clear meaning and then reprinted and used as authority by other advocates of the Jefferson-Hemings myth.
  
  
• Why a group of citizens felt it necessary to form the Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society in order to expose the false information being disseminated to destroy the reputation of the Founding Father who, as George Will said, gave us our creed and defined the American mind.
  
  
• How these attacks on Jefferson are also used to undermine the principles he stood for and on which the American republic was founded.
  

With careful attention to detail, the ten authors of this book explore the above topics plus many more in this interesting and penetrating investigation into the Jefferson-Hemings story. One after another, the carefully documented chapters show that the advocates of Thomas Jefferson's paternity not only have many of their facts wrong, they also have given inappropriate weight to most of the facts that they did have at hand. The reader of this book will come away convinced that there is no evidence at all supporting the proposition that Thomas Jefferson was the father of Sally Hemings' children.