Throughout the summer of 1692, Salem was gripped by the witch hunt. Twenty persons were executed for witchcraft; 55 were frightened or tortured into confessing their guilt; 150 were jailed; more than 200 were denounced by former friends and neighbors. For a time it looked as if Massachusetts had gone mad. But when the denunciations began to include some of the most prominent members of the community, such as the acting president of Harvard College, the authorities knew the hysteria had to stop or it would destroy the colony. In September the trials were halted and the jails emptied. In succeeding years many people repented their part in the tragic business, and the state even restored some of the property confiscated from the so-called witches. Samuel Sewall’s Confession of Error Five years after the unhappy episode ended, one of the judges, Samuel Sewall, courageously made public confession of error. As the minister read aloud Sewall’s confession of shame, the judge stood in his pew with head bowed. “Samuel Sewall, sensible of the reiterated strokes of God upon himself and family, and being sensible that as to the guilt contracted upon the opening of the late commission of Oyer and Terminer at Salem [_the trials_], to which the order for this Day relates, he is, upon many accounts, more concerned than any that he knows of, desires to take the blame and shame of it, asking pardon of men and especially desiring prayers that God, Who has an unlimited authority, would pardon that sin and all other his sins, personal and relative: and according to His infinite benignity and sovereignty not visit the sin of him or of any other upon himself or any of his, nor upon the land: but that He would powerfully defend him against all temptations to sin for the future and vouchsafe him the efficacious saving conduct of His word and spirit.” Thereafter, for the rest of his life, Samuel Sewall observed one day of prayer and fasting each year as penance for his part in the Salem witch trials. The Great Awakening Within a century after the Puritan migration to New England, life in the colonies was changing. New England Puritans were becoming Yankee traders, and the religious fervor that brought Bradford and Winthrop and their followers to the New World was dying out. At this time there appeared upon the American scene a great preacher and theologian, Jonathan Edwards. After entering Yale College at the age of 13, he had gone on to study theology and then enter the ministry. By 1729 he had succeeded his grandfather as pastor of the village church in Northampton, Massachusetts. During his ministry in Northampton, Edwards led a great revival movement, which has come to be known as the Great Awakening. It was an effort to rekindle the dying sparks of Puritanism, and for a time it brought new religious vitality to New England. The movement also spread to other colonies.