The Fletchers set out from Boston to found the settlement of Springfield, Massachusetts, but they call it Bethel. This name is a significant Biblical allusion. Bethel appears in several contexts in the Bible. The Fletchers are likely thinking of a story in Genesis, in which Jacob dreams about building, at Bethel, a ladder to heaven. Puritans thought of themselves as God's chosen people, and many of them believed that they had a higher code of morals they could spread to others. The Fletchers would think of starting a new Puritan settlement as building their own spiritual ladder to heaven.
But Bethel is also a border city in the Bible, located in territory that was disputed by the Israelite tribes of Benjamin and Ephraim. By calling Springfield "Bethel," the novel draws attention to the fact that the Fletchers make their home on disputed land. It is important to note that Sedgwick does not make the case that white settlers should cede the land. At the end of the novel and especially in her own day 200 years later, Sedgwick takes it as a foregone conclusion that white settlers and their cultural customs are there to stay. By drawing attention to Bethel's position on what colonists called the "frontier," she asks readers to think about how the land can be shared. Magawisca ultimately retreats to the "wilderness" beyond the frontier (really the land still held by American Indian people), but the novel is hopeful that coexistence and shared culture might one day be possible. This is a more progressive take than many other similar novels took at the time. Sedgwick's vision does not require the death of an entire race of people. Still, it does demand that American Indian nations yield sovereignty of their land, and it is uncritical about the devastating and lasting impacts of this new world order.
