Definition
Cartmen are persons who transport goods and merchandise by cart, typically over short distances, in exchange for hire. When cartmen hold themselves out to the public as available to carry goods as a common employment — rather than performing isolated or private hauls — they are classified as common carriers and subject to the heightened duties and liabilities that status entails.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Plural of cartman; a person who drives or operates a cart.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): A man who drives or manages a cart; a teamster.
The common meaning simply describes the occupation. The legal significance is narrower and consequential: it turns on whether the cartman offers services to the public at large as a regular business. A person who occasionally moves goods by cart for a neighbor is not a cartman in the legal sense. One who holds out carting services generally for hire crosses into common carrier status, triggering strict liability duties that ordinary bailees do not bear.
Why It Matters in Research
This term appears almost exclusively in 19th-century commercial and tort law materials. Researchers encountering "cartmen" in historical sources should immediately ask the common carrier question: the sources treat cartmen who carry for hire as a common employment as full common carriers, with all the attendant nondiscrimination obligations, liability for loss, and duty to carry for all who tender reasonable freight. This was not a minor classification — it determined the entire liability framework for a dispute.
The term has largely vanished from modern legal usage. Contemporary courts and statutes subsume this class of carrier within the general law of common carriers, motor carriers, or freight forwarders depending on context. Researchers working with 19th-century case law, especially in transportation, bailment, or negligence contexts, need to recognize that "cartmen" in those materials maps onto what modern law would simply call a common carrier operating a local or short-haul service.
There is also a regulatory layer visible in historical municipal law. Many American and English cities licensed cartmen and regulated their rates by ordinance. A research thread involving cartmen in urban commercial disputes may therefore run through local licensing records, municipal codes, and rate schedules rather than purely through common law doctrine.
Watch for the Bouvier citation to Edwards on Bailments alongside the English case law. Bouvier's entry is the most analytically useful of the historical sources because it explicitly states the common carrier classification rather than simply defining the occupation.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (1st and 2nd editions) offer identical, spare definitions: cartmen are carriers who transport goods by cart, usually short distances, for hire. Neither edition develops the legal consequences of the classification.
Bouvier's Law Dictionary is meaningfully richer. It affirmatively states that cartmen who undertake to carry goods for hire as a common employment are common carriers, citing English authority (3 C. & K. 61) and Edwards on Bailments. This is the operative legal point the Black's entries omit. Researchers relying solely on Black's for this term will miss the classification analysis that Bouvier supplies.
One Bouvier entry in the source material appears to be a fragment from a different headword (the passage about removing an article from a lady's ear reads as part of a larceny or asportation entry, not a cartmen entry). That fragment should be disregarded as a compilation artifact.
The historical dictionaries collectively reflect an era when carrier law was primarily common law doctrine, before federal and state regulatory schemes for commercial transportation displaced much of the field.
Jurisdictional Note
The common carrier classification of cartmen was recognized in both English and American common law. American courts generally followed English precedent on this point through the 19th century. Modern relevance is marginal in most jurisdictions, where motor carrier statutes and tariff regulations govern what cartmen once occupied.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
Law Mind Encyclopedia — Carriers
Law Mind Encyclopedia — Common Carriers
Law Mind Encyclopedia — Bailment