“The poet Walt Whitman, in Year of Meteors, described viewing the execution [of John Brown, abolitionist, on December 2, 1859 in Charles Town, Virginia.”

— Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Brown_(abolitionist)

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No, he most certainly didn’t.

The following are lines from Whitman’s poem “Year of Meteors:

I would sing how an old man, tall, with white hair,
mounted the scaffold in Virginia; (I was at hand—silent I stood, with teeth shut close—I
watch’d; I stood very near you, old man, when cool and indiffer-
ent, but trembling with age and your unheal’d
wounds, you mounted the scaffold;)

— Walt Whitman, Drum-Taps (1865)

Whitman used the first person singular, but he was not speaking from personal experience

— posted by Roger W. Smith

  July 2024