I had visited a university library awhile back and found some historic contracts and transaction agreements (real estate transactions, exchange of goods on specific dates, and services) in their collection dating back to the early to mid 1800s and it had me wondering -- how were these contracts verified to be authentic and enforced?
Say party 1 sells a piece of real estate or agrees to a delivery of goods with party 2 and party 2 gets a contract written to their satisfaction and both sign.
What would happen if party 1 claimed to have never signed the contract or agreed to a transaction? What kind of proof could be used for party 2 to be made whole and what enforcement mechanism if the contract not honored?
Nowadays we have video/audio recordings, we can upload documents to the cloud or have a notary come out. What did they do back then? How much confidence could one in that age have in a contract?
It was very similar to how it's done today. Deeds etc were recorded by a local official and copies kept somewhere safe.
But, also, there were a lot of scams. I've studied the history of "empresarios" in Texas. These are guys who received an official land grant from the govt of Mexico, with the idea that they would bring in settlers to homestead the land. Much of early Texas was settled this way, 100% legit.
But there were also scammers. So for example the history of Dallas, TX - the "founder" John Neely Bryan set up a cabin at a river crossing, and started selling plots of land in the area. Drew up plats and deeds, the whole deal. Only problem was he had no land grant, the Mexican govt had never heard of him.
Meanwhile, freelance agents roamed Europe telling tales about the great free land and homesteading, and selling land to the emigrants. Who would show up in Texas to find that no such place existed. No, they never got their money back.
In most cases, it worked out because there was so much open land, they found a plot anyway. And, when Texas went to war for it's independence, and won, it re-set all those problems and the new Country of Texas just recorded deeds for whoever was living there at the time.
But to get to the root of your question, enforcement was pretty much nonexistent unless you got lucky or had the wealth to pay off the right officials. Buyer beware and check those references.
The interesting thing to me is that "mail order" was a thing, very common, and large transactions were done that way - so the customer in Kansas wants to buy, say, a grist mill from back East in New York. He writes off to inquire, gets a reply with terms and pricing, and sends in his order. The payment part, I'm unclear on but bank drafts were a thing even back then. So it takes a while for all that to clear, then the mill gets put on a train and shipped out.