Were Scarlet Letters Real? Shaming Punishments in Colonial America

Did colonial courts really make people wear letters?

Yes: court records and statutes from seventeenth-century New England show that people convicted of adultery and some related offenses were ordered to wear letters or badges on their clothing. The earliest documented case in Plymouth Colony dates from September 3, 1639, when Mary Mendame was whipped at the cart's tail and ordered to wear a badge on her left sleeve ^[1]. Two years later, on December 7, 1641, the court ordered Thomas Bray and Anne Linceford to wear the letters "AD" after whipping them in Plymouth and again in Yarmouth, where the offense had taken place ^[1].

These sentences were not improvised. Plymouth wrote the penalty into its general laws in 1658 ^[1], and the province of Massachusetts adopted its own version in 1694 ^[3]. The Massachusetts Secretary of the Commonwealth's museum presents the 1694 law as the one that mandated the letter A for adultery and was later made famous by Hawthorne ^[4].

Letters were never the only shaming tool. Colonial courts also used the stocks, public whipping, branding and banishment, and the Commonwealth Museum notes that such penalties, including the cutting off of ears, reflected seventeenth-century English practice rather than a Puritan invention ^[4]. The letter was distinctive mainly because it lasted: a whipping ended the same day, while a letter followed the offender through every street and church meeting.

Timeline

1. 1639September 3: in Plymouth Colony, Mary Mendame is whipped and ordered to wear a badge on her left sleeve for adultery.
2. 1641December 7: Thomas Bray and Anne Linceford are whipped and both ordered to wear the letters AD.
3. 1641December: the Massachusetts Body of Liberties makes adultery with a married woman a capital crime.
4. 1658Plymouth's law orders two whippings and the cloth letters AD on the outer garment for adulterers.
5. 1694A Massachusetts act requires convicted adulterers to wear a capital A two inches long.
6. 1850Nathaniel Hawthorne publishes The Scarlet Letter, set in Puritan Boston.
7. 1952Last use of the whipping post in Delaware.
8. 1972Delaware, the last state to do so, removes the whipping post from its laws.

What were the AD letters in Plymouth Colony?

The AD letters were cloth initials, standing for adultery, that Plymouth's 1658 law ordered convicted adulterers to wear on their outer garments. Under that law, an adulterer was to be whipped twice, once during the court session and again at a time the court chose, and then to wear the letters; anyone found without them was to be whipped in public ^[1]. The law did not specify a color, but at least one court order required the letters to be red ^[1].

The colony's legal history explains why it chose shame rather than death. Plymouth's 1636 code had first listed adultery as an ordinary crime, then moved it among capital offenses with the qualifier that it was "to be punished," and the colony never executed anyone for it ^[2]. A survey of convictions from 1633 to 1643 counts, among the penalties for lewd behavior, a sentence of whipping combined with wearing "AD" for adultery ^[2].

Not every letter stood for adultery. In February and March 1656, Katheren Aines was convicted of unclean and lascivious behavior with William Paule rather than of adultery; she was whipped twice and made to wear a red "B" on her shoulder, while Paule was whipped and her husband was sentenced to the stocks ^[1]. In June 1661, after Thomas Burge Jr. was found guilty of "uncleanness" with Lydia Gaunt, the court debated whether he should wear capital letters as the law prescribed ^[1].

What did the 1694 Massachusetts law require?

The 1694 Massachusetts law required convicted adulterers to stand on the gallows, be whipped and wear a capital A on their clothing. According to a 2013 post by the Massachusetts Trial Court Law Libraries, which quotes chapter XXVIII of the province's laws as printed in an 1814 compilation, both partners were to be set on the gallows for an hour with a rope around their necks, then whipped on the way to jail with up to forty stripes each ^[3].

The letter itself was precisely described. It was to be a capital A two inches long and of proportional size, cut from cloth of a color different from the clothing and sewn onto the outer garments in open view; anyone caught without it faced a public whipping of up to fifteen stripes ^[3]. The same post notes that a 1695 law imposed a similar punishment on couples who lived together without being legally married, and that people convicted of incest had to wear the letter "I" for the rest of their lives ^[3].

The law librarian who wrote the post observed that the 1694 act follows Hawthorne's account very closely, but also that he could not confirm how adultery was actually punished in the 1640s, when the novel is set ^[3]. That gap between the documented law and the fictional date is the heart of the question addressed below.

How did fornication and adultery punishments differ?

Fornication, meaning intercourse between unmarried people, was usually punished by fines, whipping or the stocks, while letters were reserved mainly for adultery. In Plymouth, a June 1645 act set the penalty for fornication at a short imprisonment plus whipping or a fine of £10 per person, reduced to £5 for an engaged couple ^[1]. In practice, after 1645 the usual sentences were fines or whipping, and a man whose partner became pregnant was expected to marry her or support the child ^[1].

The line between the two offenses followed the woman's marital status. A married man who had relations with a single woman was charged with fornication, not adultery, a double standard the historian Lisa Lauria highlights in her study of Plymouth records ^[1]. In 1671, a jury convicted Mary Attkinson and John Bucke of fornication rather than adultery because it doubted whether her former husband was still alive, and the couple chose a £10 fine over a whipping ^[1].

The broader pattern of these prosecutions, from the stocks to the "pregnant brides" punished after an early birth, is covered in fornication in Puritan New England. For the question of letters, the key point is that the badge or initial was a penalty for adultery and a few related offenses, not the ordinary sentence for unmarried couples.

How did Hawthorne turn the practice into fiction?

Hawthorne turned the colonial penalty into a novel about guilt and public judgment, set in Puritan Boston and published in 1850. Britannica summarizes its central figure, Hester Prynne, as a married woman shunned after she bears a child out of wedlock ^[7]. The story opens on a scene placed "not less than two centuries ago," and a Massachusetts law library dates the action to Boston between 1642 and 1649, with Hester standing for three hours on the scaffold ^[3][6].

The novel's long preface, "The Custom-House," frames the story as a found document. The narrator claims to have discovered, among the papers of a former surveyor named Pue, a faded piece of red cloth in the shape of a capital A, each limb measuring three and a quarter inches ^[6]. In the same preface Hawthorne reflects on his own Puritan ancestors, describing the first as a bitter persecutor and his son as a man who made himself conspicuous in the witch trials ^[6].

Hawthorne also embellished. In chapter II, Hester's letter is made of fine red cloth surrounded by elaborate embroidery in gold thread, and some women in the crowd complain that the magistrates should at least have branded her forehead with a hot iron ^[6]. The embroidered letter, a sign of defiance as much as of shame, is the novel's invention; the colonial laws asked only for plain cloth initials. The novel's themes are discussed further in sin and shame in The Scarlet Letter.

What does the novel get right and wrong?

The novel is right that New England courts used letters to mark adulterers, but its timing and place do not match the documented law. In the 1640s Boston of Hester Prynne, the Massachusetts Body of Liberties, adopted in December 1641, listed adultery with a married or espoused wife among the capital crimes for both partners ^[5]. The letter A as a written Massachusetts penalty is documented only from the 1694 act ^[3].

Letters were real in the 1640s, but next door. Plymouth Colony's sentences of 1639 and 1641, and its law of 1658, show letters and badges being used in a separate, neighboring colony ^[1]. Hawthorne, in other words, combined genuine elements, the shaming letter, the public scaffold and the crowd, from different colonies and decades into a single setting.

Other details are literary choices. The scarlet color appears in some sources: one Plymouth order called for red letters, and the 1694 act required a contrasting color ^[1][3]. But there is no record of a woman named Hester Prynne, and the long arc of the story, in which the letter gradually changes meaning for the town, belongs to fiction rather than to the court books.

When did shaming punishments disappear?

Shaming punishments disappeared gradually, and the last corporal penalties outlived the colonial letters by nearly three centuries. Delaware kept the whipping post longest: according to the state's Division of Historical and Cultural Affairs, the pillory was used in all three of its counties into the twentieth century, the whipping post was last used in 1952, and the penalty was removed from state law only in 1972 ^[8]. The division describes Delaware as the last state to abolish it ^[8].

Those punishments were not neutral. Delaware's historical office notes that whipping could mean up to forty lashes for a single offense and was disproportionately inflicted on people of color, and it removed the state's last public whipping post from display on July 1, 2020 ^[8]. No source consulted for this article gives a date for the last court-ordered letter in New England, so the end of that practice cannot be pinned to a single year.

The laws that letters once enforced lasted even longer. Massachusetts repealed its adultery and fornication statutes only through chapter 155 of the Acts of 2018, approved on July 25, 2018 ^[9], and a few states still keep such offenses in their codes, as shown in fornication laws still on the books. The phrase "scarlet letter" survives in everyday American English as a byword for public stigma, kept alive far more by Hawthorne's novel than by the court records of Plymouth.

Frequently asked questions

What does the A stand for in The Scarlet Letter?

The A marks Hester Prynne's adultery. She is a married woman who has borne a child outside her marriage, and the Boston magistrates make her wear the letter in public. Hawthorne's novel echoes real colonial laws, such as Plymouth's "AD" letters and the 1694 Massachusetts letter A.

Was Hester Prynne a real person?

No. Hester Prynne is a fictional character created by Nathaniel Hawthorne for The Scarlet Letter (1850). The novel's preface pretends the story comes from old papers found in a custom house, but this is a literary device. Real women, such as Mary Mendame in Plymouth in 1639, did receive similar sentences.

Were scarlet letters used for fornication too?

Rarely. Letters were mainly a penalty for adultery, while fornication between unmarried people was usually punished by fines, whipping or the stocks. Exceptions existed: in 1656 a Plymouth woman convicted of lascivious behavior had to wear a red "B," and a 1695 Massachusetts law punished unmarried cohabitation in a similar way.

Were the letters always red?

No. Plymouth's 1658 law did not specify a color, although at least one court order required red letters. The 1694 Massachusetts act required a letter cut from cloth of a color contrasting with the clothing. Hawthorne's scarlet, gold-embroidered letter is a literary embellishment.

How big was the letter A under the 1694 law?

The 1694 Massachusetts act called for a capital A two inches long and of proportional size, sewn on the outer garments in open view. In The Scarlet Letter, the faded cloth A that the narrator claims to have found measures three and a quarter inches on each limb.

What happened if someone refused to wear the letter?

They were whipped. Plymouth's 1658 law ordered a public whipping for any convicted adulterer found without the letters, and the 1694 Massachusetts act set up to fifteen stripes for anyone caught without the A.

When was the whipping post last used in the United States?

Delaware last used its whipping post in 1952, and the state's Division of Historical and Cultural Affairs describes Delaware as the last state to abolish it. The penalty left the statute books in 1972, and in 2020 the state took its last whipping post off public display in Georgetown.