The exemption from taxation, created by the eighteenth section of the internal improvement act of 1855, is in every respect similar to that which was declared in Morgan v. Louisiana, 93 U.S. 217, to be not assignable. No words of assignability are used by the legislature of the state in the language creating it, and from its nature and context it is to be inferred that the exemption of the property of the company was intended to be of the same character as that declared in reference to its capital stock and to its officers, servants, and employes, and that all alike were privileges personal to the corporation, or to individuals connected with it, entitled to them by the terms of the law. This exemption, therefore, did not pass from the Alabama & Florida Railroad Company to the Pensacola & Louisville Railroad Company by the conveyances which passed the title to the railroad itself, and to the franchises connected with and necessary in its construction and operation.
This conclusion is confirmed by the eighteenth section of the act of February 4, 1872, amending the charter of the Pensacola & Louisville Railroad Company. That section recites that the last-named company having become assignee of the Alabama & Florida Railroad Company, and of its franchises and property, 'which corporation was exempt from taxation for a limited period, the said Pensacola & Louisville Railroad Company and its property, now owned or hereafter to be acquired, shall also be exempted from taxation during the remainder of said period.' Here the original exemption is declared to be the privilege of the Florida & Alabama Railroad Company, the particular corporation to which it was granted, and the necessity for conferring it by a new legislative grant upon the assignee of the property and franchises of the original corporation, rests upon the implication that the exemption did not pass to it by the assignment between the parties. And the further inference is equally necessary, that the exemption transferred or created in the new company by the terms of the legislative grant is identical in its character as a personal and unassignable privilege to the new grantee, with that it had when it belonged to the first company.
But the second section of the act of February 27, 1877, incorporating the Pensacola Railroad Company, authorized and empowered it to acquire by purchase and assignment all the property, rights, franchises, privileges, and immunities of the Pensacola & Louisville Railroad Company, and, upon completion of such purchase and assignment, declared that the former should be deemed, in law and in equity, to be fully invested with and entitled to all the said property, rights, franchises, privileges, and immunities as though the same were originally granted to or acquired by the said Pensacola Railroad Company.
It is claimed that this language is broad enough to cover the assignment and transfer of the immunity from taxation granted to the Pensacola & Louisville Railroad Company by the eighteenth section of its charter. And we are of this opinion. The language is comprehensive and unequivocal, and the word 'immunity' is apt to describe the exemption claimed. It admits of no doubt, we think, if the Pensacola & Louisville Railroad Company were entitled to this exemption, and if the legislative grant of authority to make and accept this assignment of it was valid and effective, that the right to be exempt from taxation according to its terms passed to the Pensacola Railroad Company. But it must be borne in mind that it must be taken to have vested in the latter, if at all, precisely as it had in the former; that is, as a personal privilege. The assignment in the particular instance, based upon the express authority of a new enactment, did not impart to the immunity the quality of general assignability to other successors in the title to the property and franchises, claiming only under a conveyance between the parties.