Charles Coffin Harris (1822–1881) was a New England lawyer who became a politician and judge in the Kingdom of Hawaii who firmly supported the monarchy as an independent nation.

Younger brother Thomas Aston Harris (born 1824) went on to a career in the steamship business, and served in the American Civil War.

[3] In September 1850 when the Hawaiian Princes Alexander and Lot returned from their trip the United States and Europe, they encouraged Harris to become a lawyer in their kingdom.

[7] For a few years the family shipping business produced furniture stuffing called pulu from a soft fern that grew in Kahuku.

[8]: 154, 163 Some time in the 1860s Harris tried to develop an early sugarcane plantation that is now Kaneohe Ranch on the east coast of Oahu with Queen Dowager Kalama.

On August 26, 1862, King Kamehameha IV (former Prince Alexander) appointed him as Attorney General of Hawaii, a post effectively vacant since John Ricord had left in 1847.

A constitutional convention failed to reach agreement, so Harris got the cabinet to negotiate directly with Kamehameha V who accepted the result which lasted 23 years.

[11] Although he resigned as attorney general, he acted in that capacity until a new one (fellow New Englander Stephen Henry Phillips) was appointed in September 1866.

[8]: 212–213 Harris in the meanwhile proceeded to Washington, D.C., where he found the United States Senate did not have the two-thirds vote needed to ratify the treaty.

[3] On February 1, 1877, he became chief justice of the supreme court when Elisha Hunt Allen resigned as he was sent back to work out details of the Reciprocity Treaty of 1875.

[19] Although often remembered outside of Hawaii by Twain's satiric attacks, at his death Harris was honored even by former political opponents such as William Richards Castle, Alfred S. Hartwell, and Albert Francis Judd.

[20] Some historians speculate that Harris was a model for the character from New England who becomes active in a medieval kingdom in Twain's novel A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.

Judd, who followed him as chief justice, said:Much of what had been distrusted during the trying days of the Constitutional Convention of 1864, time has proved were plans laid more wisely than the actors knew, for the strengthening and centralizing of the authority of this Government, so essential to the security of life, liberty, and prosperity of this land.

[22] After becoming part of the Samuel Mills Damon estate, another large section was sold to expand Hawaii Volcanoes National Park in 2003,[7][23] and some remains as a tourist accommodation.