The novel is set in Boston and Bethel, Massachusetts (modern-day Springfield), as well as the surrounding areas. The action is set in the 1630s and 1640s, more than a century prior to the Revolutionary War and almost two centuries prior to the time Sedgwick is writing from. It is important to consider the political climate of Massachusetts and North America more broadly, both in Hope Leslie's day and in Catharine Maria Sedgwick's day. In the 1630s and 1640s, English Puritans had only been in the area we now know as New England for a few decades. As Mr. Fletcher's backstory hints, they were a fairly strict religious sect, and it took some time for them to build much political backing for their colonization efforts. To the many American Indian nations in the area, they were invaders. Their presence catalyzed a great deal of violence, and alliances formed and shifted rapidly as people defended their land.
Other European groups also became mixed up in these alliances. The Puritans in the novel despise Catholics in part because Catholicism was associated with France and other continental European nations that entered alliances against the English. The characters in the novel are often paranoid of one another because of the extremely volatile political backdrop of their lives. Magawisca leaves for the "wilderness" at the end of the novel, but her sense of a clear boundary between white "civilization" and American Indian "wilderness" is largely a product of Sedgwick's retrospective imagination.
By the time Catharine Maria Sedgwick was writing, in the 1820s, European colonists had largely settled the question of what territory they would each go after. English colonists had developed their own identity in opposition to England and declared independence, establishing the United States. They had consolidated their power and declared political sovereignty in the area we know as the original 13 colonies. American Indian nations still existed throughout this territory and still do, but the United States used its growing legal system as well as brute force to strip American Indians of rights and break apart their political and cultural infrastructure. Just three years after Sedgwick published Hope Leslie, President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act that authorized the United States to deport American Indians from existing states to land west of the Mississippi River. This devastating piece of legislation traded catastrophic suffering within American Indian communities so that United States citizens (mostly white people at this time) could have more property. Sedgwick's novel treats the prospect of Indian Removal (and the long line of U.S. policies that aimed to gradually remove American Indians from sight) as a tragedy, and she imagines instead an alternate history and an alternate future in which everyone (Magawisca, Hope, Faith, Oneco, etc.) can share the land. It is nonetheless important to note that at no point does she imagine an alternate history in which English colonists give up any land or power, or a future in which the United States does the same.
