On the one hand, you're correct in that the act of domestic violence and the concept of punishment are related; however, the matter is somewhat more complicated than the idea of violence being disguised as punishment, which implies a kind of strict line between the two that simply didn't exist.

In conduct literature of the early colonial period, largely that from and imported to Puritan New England, the world was divided up into a fixed hierarchy based on age, gender, and social position - men were in authority over women, and elites were over the common herd. At the same time, the literature shows a strong expectation of companionate marriage. Men and women were to function as pairs of opposites, men operating in the public world and women quietly filling in domestically; women were to show respect to their husbands as their superiors, avoid showing too much familiarity, and refrain from insulting or arguing with them. (Even when a woman was in a superior social position, she was not to beat a male servant or underling - sometimes she might be sentenced to a whipping herself for having done so.) But men were also supposed to respect their wives' opinions and listen to their advice, and they were told to not just be reasonable "governors" of their wives, as they were to be with other people in inferior positions, but to be tender, kind, and gentle, treating them better than the servants and children. Men were to call their wives by their names or "love"/"spouse", and to avoid harsh language and verbal abuse, particularly in front of other people, under pain of legal consequences. And unlike advice to employers regarding servants or parents regarding children, the conduct books were emphatic that husbandly governance was not to include physical punishment. Outside of court-ordered punishment, male on female violence in general was looked down on in colonial New England! Later conduct literature of the Revolutionary period took this even further, telling men to make a show of chivalrous attention even to women who weren't their wives, although this was not the same kind of serious deference paid to their male social superiors and even equals - a trend that would continue into and through the nineteenth century.

But what about reality outside of the ideal, cleanly-delineated world of conduct literature? It is much more complicated and messy.

Laws like the Massachusetts Bay Colony one you cite in the question text against domestic violence (as well as those against adultery and fornication), existed throughout New England and in areas of New York and New Jersey settled by New Englanders - not only did the Puritan standard of conduct require husbands to respect their wives, but the church sought to control elements of disorder and violence in society in general. These laws went on the decline in the colonies from the beginning of the eighteenth century as judges chosen out of the local populace were being replaced with those trained in colleges, with more interest in complicating the American legal system to make it as valid and serious as the English one than in enforcing moral standards. At the same time, religious life in the colonies was fracturing as more different Christian sects took hold and none had the same kind of authority as the all-encompassing Puritan church. As a result, the extra-legal folk practice of charivaris, skimmingtons, or "rough music" picked up the slack in lower-class urban and rural social groups in order to punish, among others, men who abused their authority to a degree considered unfair. Women in particular participated in charivari "courts" with the tacit approval of their husbands (though sometimes these were cases of men punishing other men), pulling abusers out of their homes and beating them with rods, or ducking them in nearby ponds. To repeat, though, rough music was a recourse open to the poor; women of the bourgeoisie were more likely to be subject to the chilling effect of the judges with their eyes on the Inns of Court.

Varying levels of violence could exist in marriage, and women who were the victims of it tended to complain not that marriage should never have violence, but that they in particular were holding up the wifely end of the bargain and so should not have had to face it. Until the second half of the nineteenth century, when the activists of the nascent women's rights movement started to achieve serious goals, the legal community tended to ignore abuse, although society did not actively promote it - but even then, it was not the leading issue that it has been since the late twentieth. Abused wives were considered more sympathetic if they were still with their husbands, rather than leaving them and then seeking redress; abuse might frequently be presented as a secondary problem to a husband's lack of support or habitual drunkenness, if not to some degree the wife's fault: something she partially deserved for arguing about her husband's drinking or wasting/spending money, or for actively failing at taking care of the children or house.

From the late eighteenth century, reformers were writing in clear and certain terms about the abuses women suffered in marriages to unkind, intemperate, or evil men, but the general sentiments of society and particularly the criminal justice system were far behind. However, society and the legal system also did not tend to explicitly condone domestic abuse in the vein of the apocryphal "rule of thumb" (ie, that a man could beat his wife with a stick no larger than his thumb) - while the line between "dangerous battering" and "a private matter we shouldn't stick our noses into" wasn't clearly defined, there was little space for the idea of legitimate, systematic corporal punishment of wives by husbands.