Lee lost a few very small battles before he started to win. So much so that they originally called him Granny Lee.
Grant never lost a battle. At Cold Harbor after Grant made that hellish mistake both side stood their ground. Funny thing is, Grant made the same exact mistake Lee made at Gettysburg.
The sad part of that battle was that neither Lee nor Grant would send out a white flag to collect the men fallen in the field. So much so that Lee refused to negotiate to terms for a cease fire to do that. By the time they agreed, they collected very few still alive on that battlefield. It manifested itself at the very end of the war in VA when Grant reached out to Lee to discuss terms. Nearly every Union General, remembering Cold Harbor, took a stand to utterly destroy Lees army. Grant said no, and the rest is history.
Did Grant drink? Yes, when there wasnt anything going on he’d hit the whisky. But when things were lively, he never touched the stuff and to be honest, he never drank anymore than any of some of the other military leaders in our history-like Patton. Problem was, it took hardly anything for him to get drunk.
Grant and Sherman were the fathers of modern warfare. The Germans TO THIS DAY, study their tactics. Lee was stuck back in the old Napoleon style warfare and that was his downfall.
Actually, he lost his first battle, but it was a minor one: the Battle of Belmont.
I admire Grant very much, so I'm not picking on him, but at Cold Harbor the overwhelming number of wounded men on the field were his. He did not want to gather them under the customary white flag of truce, since it would signify he'd been defeated (he had). Lee insisted on proprieties, and there were several letters back and forth. Grant intentionally misrepresented Lee's intent in his reply to Lee's first letter. It was a tragic show of stubbornness between the two generals.