Charles Jones Jenkins (1805–1883) was a prominent Georgia attorney, jurist, and political leader whose career spanned the antebellum, Civil War, and Reconstruction eras. Born in South Carolina, he moved to Georgia in 1816 and graduated from Union College in 1824. He established a successful law practice in Augusta and entered public service in 1830, serving extensively in the state legislature, where he became Speaker of the House, and acting as state attorney general from 1831 to 1834.

Politically, Jenkins was a prominent moderate Whig who sought to balance Southern interests with preservation of the Union. In 1850, he drafted the "Georgia Platform," which established the state's conditional acceptance of the Compromise of 1850 based on the strict federal protection of slavery and the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act. Though initially a "cooperationist" who opposed immediate unilateral secession, he supported the Confederacy once Georgia seceded in 1861. During the war, he served as a justice on the Supreme Court of Georgia.

Elected Governor of Reconstruction Georgia in 1865, Jenkins successfully restored the state's bankrupt finances but resisted federal mandates granting civil rights to newly emancipated Black citizens. He opposed the Fourteenth Amendment, unsuccessfully sued to block the Reconstruction Act of 1867, and was ultimately removed from office by federal military authorities in 1868 for refusing to fund a constitutional convention that recognized Black civil rights. After living abroad, he returned to Georgia, briefly reentered public life to preside over the state's 1877 constitutional convention, and retired to Augusta, where he died on June 14, 1883.