In The Scarlet Letter, what is the perception of America's Puritan settlers and their vision of right and wrong?

In Chapter XXI of The Scarlet Letter,
a chapter entitled "The New England Holiday," Hawthorne writes satirically of the
Puritans' one holiday of the year:

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Into this festal season of the year—as it
already was, and continued to be during the greater part of two centuries—the Puritans
compressed whatever mirth and public joy they deemed allowable to human infirmity;
thereby so far dispelling the customary cloud, that, for the space of a single holiday,
they appeared scarcely more grave than most other communities at a period of general
affliction.

This holdiay,
Hawthorne writes, is the one day of the year in which the people do not wear "the
blackest shade of Puritanism."  In fact, Hawthorne as narrator portrays the Puritanic
gloom from the first chapter which opens with a throng that stands
in

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sad-colored garments and grey steeple-crowned
hats, intermixed with women, some wearing hoods,... assemble in front of a wooden
edifice, the door of which was heavily timbered with oak, and studded with iron
spikes.

That a prison is
necessary to enforce Puritanism points to the failings of this religion.  For, with such
severe penalties as those that are imposed upon sinners, hypocrisy arises with the
community, as clearly exemplified by Arthur Dimmesdale and Roger Chillingsworth, who
both subjugate their hearts to the intellect.  Thus subjugated, the essence of a person
"withers like an uprooted weed left in the sun," Hawthorne writes.  This is why Hester's
hair has lost its luminousness; she is compromised between independence and conformity
by her punishment. 

With Hester as silent voice to the
hypocrisy of Puritanism, she demonstrates the wrongs of such a patriarchal society that
hypocritically denies the very humanity of its members as it will admit no sin. Modeled
after Anne Hutchinson who was condemned as a religious heretic and excommunicated for
her dissent.  Likewise, in The Scarlet Letter, Hester represents
the threat of anarchy. Thus, in her public sin, Hester is the scapegoat for the
transgressions of others because she has resisted the demands of the Puritanical
culture.  Hawthorne's final exhoration, and statement of theme, is clearly against this
Puritanical hypocrisy: 

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"Be true!  Be true! Show freely to the world, if
not your worst, yet some trait whereby the worst may be
inferred!"

For Hawthorne as a
Romantic, sin occurs when one denies one's own nature or forces someone also to conform
to a foreign code of principles or behavior.  Clearly, Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel
The Scarlet Letter is an indictment against the gloom of
Calvinistic Puritanism, as well as an expression of his ancestral
guilt.