What feelings about the setting does Irving want to arouse?

Because Irving wants to satirize how excessively greedy America is becoming in the early nineteenth century, when the story was published, he chooses to set the story in the waning days of the Puritan period in New England. He chooses the Great Awakening as the time period to weave a cautionary tale, because the Great Awakening was a failure as a revival movement; the American people had lost interest in rebuilding a religious utopia in favor of making money. The New England colonies were meant to be, by their earliest settlers, the religious counterpart to the commercial American colonies in the South.
The swamp, where Tom Walker encounters the devil, is meant to symbolize the dark part of human consciousness where we entertain our worst thoughts. In Tom's cause, it is his unrelenting desire for material gain and his desire not to share it with his equally greedy wife.